Skill and Knowledge Levels

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Skill and Knowledge Levels

We have been using assessments in all of our training and learning products for over thirty-five years. The primary purpose of our assessments was to help us to adapt and adjust our teaching in order that our students learn. We first had a “Pretest” to measure what the students know when they start our class. Then we had a “Final Assessment” to determine what the difference was in knowledge before and after. This allows us to change how we teach.

We also used these assessments to challenge our approach to teaching. If the same question was received with the same wrong answer, obviously how we were teaching it was the issue not the learning potential of the student.

Let’s turn to our Job Function Assessments at Learning Without Scars (LWS). By now I hope you have looked at our job function comprehensive skill assessments. We believe we have broken new ground with these assessments for the Industries we serve. There are no other common job function assessments out there. With that position of leadership, we have been cautious on how we have approached this. We have had over 3,500 of our class assessments completed in the past two years. This has allowed us to established a hierarchy based on actual employee skills and their results on the assessments.

Upon completion of a specific Job Function Skills Assessment the student will receive their score (0-100). This score will rank their skills based on the results we have seen from the thousands of assessments taken. We have established these skill categories based on our experiences with our class assessments and the skill levels of the people taking these classes. For Learning Without Scars these skill categories are Basic (0-30), Intermediate (31-50), Advanced (51-70) and Expert (71-100). This category level will identify the specific class progressions to allow them to improve their skill level. These category levels have allowed us to design individualized class structures for the student to follow to improve their individual skill level. More on this next week.

We want each individual to be able to achieve their potential. Potential is a wonderful word. It is one that I was introduced to by an Elder in our Church when I was a little boy. He spent a lot of time mentoring a young boy. He passed several messages to me to consider.

  • Always assume the other person is twice as smart as you are and work twice as hard to prove that they are not.
  • Be Happy in your Work or Work and be Happy. You have no choice you have to Work.

If someone tells you that you have a lot of potential and you are sixteen years old that is a very good thing. If someone tells you that you have a lot of potential and you are sixty-six what have you been doing for the last fifty years.

The time is now.

For more information on our assessments and classes, please visit our website at learningwithoutscars.org

How to Use Assessments

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How to Use Assessments

Yesterday we addressed the Foundation of Learning. Today I want to talk about how we envisioned businesses using our Job Function Skills Assessment. Let’s quickly review what we say on the Landing Page for Assessments.

We point out four areas in which to use our Skill Assessments

  1. Recruiting: The assessments can be used in recruiting employees. In conjunction with background checks and interviews, the assessment gives you much more information on the applicants before they are hired. Hiring the “right” someone is extremely difficult to do. The assessment provides the Company hiring the individual an objective view of the skills of the prospective employee.

 

  1. Performance Reviews: The assessments should also be used in the annual performance review with each employee. Other than the reviews I give myself I have never received a formal performance review as an employee. I believe that performance reviews are a terrific opportunity to discuss with the employee what is necessary for the employee to do to become better at what they do and open up more opportunities for them in the Company.

 

  1. Wages and Salaries: The assessments can even be used as an objective foundation related to the establishment of the wages and salaries paid to the employees. We have had several thousand people take our assessments since the beginning of 2017 and we have a high degree of confidence that our skill levels are in line with the actual performance of the employees. This provides a foundation for the proper wage and salary scales and progressions through the scales to be objectively managed.

 

  1. Employee Development: The assessments have been developed to be used to create individualized employee development programs for each employee in the parts and service business teams. A career path for each employee in the Parts, Service, Selling or Marketing groups allows talented people to be motivated to achieve their potential. With the Skill Levels from the assessments and the Learning Paths tied to them this becomes a real possibility within these teams of people.

 

Attracting, Hiring, Developing and Retaining talented, motivated employees is the MOST critical of all aspects of your business. With the right people you will prevail. Without them you will FAIL.

 

The choice is yours.

 

The time is now.

The Foundation of Learning

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The Foundation of Learning

Too often in the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, work and family and friends, we have our head down and we are trying to get through the day without being killed. Everything is such a rush. For most of 2020, a year which we hope to get through, we have been stuck. Too much to worry about, we don’t know what is going on, we are getting bombarded by conflicting messages on all the media, social media fan the fire further with well-meaning (for the most part) people sharing their opinions. We no longer feel as if we are in control of our lives, if ever we were.

The school age people are in flux as well. Virtual learning has become commonplace without having education re-imagined and redesigned. Most teaching is in front of a computer screen talking as if the teacher were in the classroom with the students. The students are sitting in front of their computer screen, which many students had never had before, over inconsistent networks bored to tears. We are social animals we need to interact with people in real time live.

Some learning platforms were ahead of their time. The Khan Academy, founded in 2008 has 100 million registered users. Sal Khan, the founder, states that virtual learning cannot replace classroom learning. In the “virtual class the students are missing out on the social and emotional benefits from in person classes.”

But the Khan Academy provides significant guidance on their learning platform in how to learn.

  • Students practice at their own pace, first filling in gaps in their understanding and then accelerating their learning.
  • Teachers can identify gaps in their students’ understanding, tailor instruction, and meet the needs of every student.

I believe that is the very foundation of learning.

Teachers and students able to identify “gaps” in the students understanding of a specific subject and then tailoring the instruction to meet the needs of each individual student.

At Learning Without Scars the foundation of our employee development platform is what we call “Job Function Skills Assessments.” We call these our Comprehensive Skills Assessments.

We offer a range of assessments for the Parts business, the Service Business and the Selling and Marketing aspects of the Parts and Service businesses.

You select your Department by scrolling down on that landing page. Then, all that is required is that you select your current job function and you will land on a brief write-up telling you what the assessment is about.

Each assessment, other than our technician assessments, consists of 90 multiple choice questions. These questions have been selected from the internet based subject specific classes that we offer. The student is given a time limit of an hour to complete the assessment. The time restriction is another indicator of the knowledge and level of skills that the student has on their specific job function. Upon completion of the assessment the “student” is given a score.

From that score, and the thousands of skills assessments already completed by our clients, we are able to identify the “Gaps” in the “students’” knowledge and create a specific “Learning Path” for each “student.” (more on that in the days to come)

Our Learning Platform follows the same logic as is employed by the Khan Academy. We determine the gaps in the individual employee’s skills and then create a customized learning path for each of them.

This is how we have established “Our Foundation of Learning.”

We have 32 of these job function assessments and the results we have seen to date are extremely exciting.

Next blog we will talk about the specific ways that a business can use our Skill Assessments. The choice you make on “Individual Employee Skills Development” is of critical importance to your business, your customers and most importantly to your employees.

The time is now.

Why Do We Need to Change?

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Why Do We Need to Change?

Robert Quinn says “One key to successful leadership is continuous personal change. Personal change is a reflection of our inner growth and empowerment.”

It’s important to evolve and to adjust as we grow deeper in the knowledge of ourselves and those around us too.

But why are people afraid to change? Why is change so difficult when we all know it’s inevitable?

James Belasco and Ralph Stayer, authors of the book “The Flight of the Buffalo,” couldn’t have said it any better “Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.”

This week let’s think about the changes we’re afraid of making in our own lives. Are we overestimating the value of the very things we hold near and dear to us? Are we underestimating what the future may hold? Something to think about. Let’s be more aware of the need for change.

Today we finished an upgrade to our Learning Without Scars website.

We would like to invite everyone to come take a look at our new layout here.

Brian Shanahan, of Shanahan Strategy, with whom we have been working on our websites for ten plus years, has done a terrific job for us.

This change allows our clients to utilize e-commerce to purchase any of our Learning Without Scars products. It also shows a different focus on learning by utilizing our Skill Assessment Tools. From the scores achieved on the Job Function Skills Assessment we now offer a “Learning Path” recommendation of classes to take in order to improve their Skills Level. Those classes have been reorganized and the layout of their presentation has also been re-imagined here.

With the change to the website we have focused on getting in place many of the things that our clients have requested of us so far:

  1. Simplicity
  2. Ease of Navigation
  3. The ability to complete transactions online
  4. Excitement on the site

You will ultimately be the judge. But we are pleased. You will be hearing a lot more about this each day. We hope you take some time and look at the new site and give us any feedback you wish. We would welcome your help in keeping us as the most comprehensive and current employee development platform in the Industry.

The time is now.

All offerings are available at learningwithoutscars.org. Contact ron@learningwithoutscars.org if you would like to plan for a custom program.

Leaders with Skills and Knowledge – the PLP

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Leaders With Skills and Knowledge – the PLP.

We started our journey of assisting in employee development in the early 1990s with the management training programs we developed for the Parts and Service Teams. We created two-day classroom programs for executives, management, supervision and first line team leaders. These classes focused on operations, finance, selling and management supplemented with a manual of roughly 200 pages in length.

What we didn’t do was offer a test for each program and progress testing to plant the knowledge more deeply into the student’s mind. You will find another blog post later this week from the wonderful book “Make It Stick” which is aimed at “The Science of Successful Learning.”

The Quest, Learning Centers, classroom courses were developed and then tested with executives who sat through the programs as they were being developed to assist us in how these programs were created.

Since the inception of these leadership classes we have had the opportunity to teach more than 4,000 dealer employees.

This film will define and describe how the PLP – Planned Learning Programs, classes work. Each one covers ten classes and provides twenty hours of training. The PLP programs are three years and covers thirty classes with sixty hours of knowledge transfer.

With the PLP’s we have a twenty question, multiple choice exam at the conclusion and also put forward “quizzes” three or four times through the learning experience. These “tests” are aimed, as indicated above, at implanting the knowledge more completely into the students’ mind. The science of learning tells us that testing stops almost completely forgetting the content of the class.   

The film you are about to see, which is the final program in the troika of learning and will give you an explanation of the PLP Program. I hope you enjoy it.

The Time is Now.

Focusing on the Job – the PSP Program

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Focusing on the Job – the PSP program.

Continuing to define and describe what we do at Learning Without Scars takes us to our position of providing a pathway for employee development at their individual job functions.

Most Industry and Wholesaler Learning Programs are focused on parts product training and department management. At the AED where for twenty-five years we conducted all of the Parts and Service training the focus was on management. We operated classroom programs lasting two days. The Executives and Managers who attended these classes learned the ins and outs of Parts Management or Service Management and we took them through a three-year development structure starting with “What it Looks Like When it is Right” and moving to “Performance Excellence” and finishing with “Reaching Market Potential.” They were all good programs and we did this training from 1994 through 2015.

However, as was pointed out to me by a very successful executive in our Industry, “you need to create job function training not management training.”

That resonated with me and as a result we have created specific job function training programs. That is what we call Planned Specific Programs – PSP’s. Our PSP’s are aimed at the specific job functions within the Parts and Service businesses. Instore Selling, which covers the telephone and counter job functions, Parts Office and Warehousing, Inventory Management for the Parts business. Foremen/Lead-hand, Service Writer, Inspector, and Service Office for the Service business. And more.

The film you are about to see will give you an explanation of the PSP Program. I hope you enjoy it.

The Time is Now.

Your Stakeholders – Back to Basics

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This is our second installment in our Back to Basics theme, covering the topic of your stakeholders.  Last week, we began with the Balanced Scorecard and the customers.

The next piece of Back to Basics is the value that we deliver to the stakeholders.

When we talk about your stakeholders, who de we mean?

Simply put, your stakeholders means the employees, the company leadership, the owners, the shareholders, and the suppliers of your business.  Since you have all learned that I like to begin with definitions in order to have clarity in each topic, your stakeholders are the individuals and groups who invest in your business with their time, their money, their ideas, and their resources.  The customers benefit from the commitment of your stakeholders, and your stakeholders benefit from the growth and development of your company and your customer loyalty.

Here we go back to metrics and standards of performance, also known as Key Performance Indicators.  These Key Performance Indicators are Revenue, Profitability, Expense Control, Asset Management and how the department and business performs.

One of these metrics is Return on Assets (ROA). That leads us to next step in the Back to Basics – investments. The owners of the business have to continue to reinvest in the Company if they want growth. The effectiveness of the business to steward the company assets will allow the owners to determine the level of risk they want to take on relative to the future growth opportunities. If the management does not deliver performance then owners will not have much interest in reinvestment.

So how does this tie in to everything we do here at LWS?

Employee Development is a straightforward investment into the business, its stakeholders, and its vision for the future.  Employee Development correlates to employee satisfaction, which has a demonstrated impact on customer satisfaction.  Satisfied employees = satisfied customers.

As you can see, getting Back to the Basics comprises many aspects of your business.  But you will find that the results are well worth the work.

The time is now.

Where Should We Begin? #MondayBlogs

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I often say that life is simple, and people make it complicated.

The same is true of our processes and procedures – they can be simple, unless we make it complicated.

Let’s first review one thing I know to be true: everyone wants to do a good job.  No one wakes up in the morning, excited to go to work and do a terrible job.  Everyone wants to succeed and do a good job.

But one key to doing a good job, is KNOWING what we need to do.  This crucial piece applies across ALL industries, it applies to our professional lives and, frankly, it applies to our personal lives as well.  In order to succeed, we need to know what has to be done.

When it comes to repairs for our customers, our Work Order Process has a series of simple steps for us to use to determine what must take place in order to meet the needs of our customer base.

I hope you enjoy this small video tutorial on the beginning of the Work Order Process.

The time is now.

Let’s Get Serious About Our Employees #MarketingMonday

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Some thoughts for your consideration:

You have seen over the past two to three weeks a change in the approach to the blog. We have been exposing Vimeo based film clips. You have seen our promotional trailer, the animation of Socrates, an introduction to the company and a video clip on market segmentation. I want today to present a situation and then pose some questions in the Socratic Manner. Socratic teaching forces people to come to their own conclusions.

Employees transition through three or four stages in their career:

  • Enthusiastic Beginner
  • Disillusioned Learner
  • Capable but Cautious Performer
  • Self-Reliant Achiever

 

Unfortunately, it is their immediate supervisor that has a direct impact on this transition. Too often we get stuck at the Disillusioned Learner as a result of the style of the boss or the lack of any interest from the boss in the employee.

 

As individuals as we move from school to work we have to overcome a series of things that I will call “personal obstacles.” These things come from our families, our friends and peers and our schools. I have often said we are taught to be obedient in our developmental years and when we get to the workforce we are asked to think on our own.

 

These obstacles normally are

 

  • We are told everything we want to do is impossible
  • We are afraid of hurting those we love by pursuing our own dreams
  • We are afraid we will fail in pursuit of our dreams.
  • We are afraid to succeed.

 

One of the important questions we need to ask of ourselves is “what would I do if I wasn’t afraid?”

 

In our training approach, we are developing an employee development program that will take each employee in the parts and service groups from the enthusiastic beginner to a self-reliant achiever. My question is “how do you achieve that today?

 

The time is now.