The Challenges We Face

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The Challenges We Face

Today, founder Ron Slee continues our series on Lifelong Learning with this blog post: The Challenges We Face. Education should lead to learning, shouldn’t it?

You are seeing it everywhere these days. The progress that has been made in education has not been very good. Through the pandemic and all the arguments about going to school or going virtual with reading, writing and arithmetic measures are all pointing out that things are not very good.

The New York Times reporting on September 1st, 2022 that the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropped to the levels from two decades ago. For the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress test began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-olds lost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years.

What makes this more troublesome is that “Student test scores, even starting in first, second and third grad, are really quite predictive of their success later in school, and their educational trajectories overall” said Susanna Loeb, the director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which focuses on educational inequality. This holds serious implications for our society. Over the past decade or so, student scores had leveled off rather than gained, while gaps widened between low-and high-performing students.

One last comment comes from Dr. Ho, a professor of education at Harvard and an expert on education testing. He tells the story of a “decade of progress” followed by a “decade of inequality.”  He continues “Now we have our work cut out for us.” There are people now calling for a “Marshall Plan” for education. Janice K. Jackson, who led the Chicago Public Schools until last year and is currently a board member of Chiefs for Change. She is saying “no more of the arguments, and the back and forth and the vitriol and the finger pointing. Everybody should be treating this like the crisis it is.”

For some time, the world looked to America for ideas and concepts in educational success. That is no longer true, if it ever was. From the 1930’s. when the President of Harvard dramatically increased the learning options, from the basic “Science and English curriculum,” and dramatically increased the monies coming into the University, we have seen a decline in the University creation of “work ready” graduates for our society. Today we have over 11,000,000 open jobs in the USA. Companies are looking to hire 11,000,000 people. Although answering the question of how many people are unemployed is tricky to answer, Heather Long published a report in February in 2021 that provided the official number of unemployed people in the United States as 10.1 million. This from a report the Labor Department puts out every Friday. But there are other numbers to consider. Unemployment payments have been going out regularly to 20 million people. Perhaps these people are unemployable. By Colleague Ed Gordon continues to tell me that by 2030 50% of the American Workforce will not have the skills required to be employed. If he is correct, we as a society are in a very serious situation. The Challenge is Real.   

In 1965 the federal government began guaranteeing student loans provided by banks and non-profit lenders. They created a program that is now called the Federal Family Education Loan program. The American public has been bombarded for many decades that the path to success in the US is to have a University Degree. The message was very successful. In 1980 there were 3,231 higher education institutions in the United States. By 2016, that number increased by more than a third to 4,350 (how government guaranteed student loans killed the American Dream for Millions by Daniel Kowalski). According to Forbes, the average price of tuition has increased eight times faster than wages since the 1980s. In 2018 the Federal Reserve estimated that there was $1.5 trillion in unpaid student debt.

If after reading this far you don’t sense a problem then I have done a very poor job of communicating.

Career and Technical Education as we now know it has its roots in the founding of the United States. There were a series of stages through which learning progressed; The Awakening (1776–1826) which provide a right to a free public education, primarily to boys. Independent Action (1826–1876) when public education joined with the workforce to provide a continuous stream of workers for different jobs. The Vocational Education Age (1876-1936) the first manual training school, established in St Louis, Missouri, in 1879. Coming of Age (1926-1976) the first mass acceptance of career and technical training. Technical Schools are thought to produce job ready skills for work that is demand. They don’t cost nearly as much as university.

Mike Rowe says “We are lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist. That’s nuts.” Since 1980, the cost of going to college has risen by 260%. If you attend a technical college, then the cost of your entire education is the equivalent of one year at another institution. Today only 19% of college enrollees can earn their degree in four years or less. (Trade School vs College: The Big Pros and Cons for each June 24 2019 by Louise Gaille). Further, there are several trade schools operating right now in the US which offer vocational opportunities online.

An article was written in the Samuel Centre for Social Connectedness by Jeremy Monk in March of 2018. He starts the article recounting an information session at a local technical and career education center. He tells us he attended a school known for its academic rigor and high ranking. Most students laughed at the idea of attending a vocational school. A school counsellor told those going to the information session the following story.

You are rushed to the hospital one evening and told you need emergency surgery for a rare infection. The only doctor who knows how to perform this surgery is at his country house and it will take an hour for him to get to the hospital. The doctor gets in his fancy car and starts the trip. Twenty minutes into the trip something happens to his engine and his car stalls on a rural highway. The doctor calls a local mechanic who rushes over, and in a few minutes diagnoses the problem and fixes the problem. The doctor makes it to the hospital and performs the surgery successfully. The school counsellor then asks the question.

Who do you thank – The Doctor or the Mechanic?

While University education has been promoted at most levels of society career, vocational and technical education has become increasingly stigmatized. Finding for technical education programs have decreased and vocational credit offered in high schools have dropped. Career, Vocational and Technical Education has been portrayed as a Plan B, a “Silver” medal compared to a university education. Recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed that nearly 44 percent of recent college graduates were employed in jobs not requiring university degrees in 2016.

Germany continues to show us how to proceed. They have a greater percentage of young people opting for non-university post-secondary education. There is also much greater respect for these students. Similar social and education programs are dominant in Scandinavia. In Finland, which is often referenced as the jewel of all national education systems nearly 45% of students choose a technical path.   

The evidence is clear. The facts are compelling. Society is showing this in how the “white” collar and “blue” collar job status is viewed. This has created a social hierarchy. It isolates people and further divides us. We face some very serious challenges. Don’t forget the doctor would still be on the side of the road waiting if it had not been for the mechanic. 

The Time is Now.

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Transitions In Our Education System

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Transitions In Our Education System

In this week’s post for Lifelong Learning, founder Ron Slee takes a hard look at some of the transitions in our education system, and why we need those transitions now more than ever.

I come from a family of teachers. My grandmother was a teacher and my mother taught. We have been teachers for over one hundred years. My grandmother taught in a one room schoolhouse. Educators seemed to be all around me. My mother chose all of my teachers in grade school. She was the Vice Principal at the school, and I couldn’t get away with anything. But for some reason I always used to watch my teachers and how they worked. One thing a lot of us forget is that the “teacher” is typically the only person that we see at work when we are children. 

I remember one particular teacher of mine in High School. He taught high school boys health. A subject that really gets the attention of teenage boys, right? He did some amazing things to keep us engaged. He used facial expressions, he used his voice dramatically, he used body language. He used everything he could think about to keep our attention. It made quite an impression on me. Over my career and involvement in training and teaching one thing always has stood out to me. You have a responsibility to keep the attention and interest of your students, your audience. 

I also remember another teacher who had a Master’s Degree in English and he was teaching Mathematics. His first class with us is indelibly etched on my mind. He said, “if I can learn to teach you mathematics with an English education all of you will pass this class.” He meant it and he delivered. Everyone passed. Several of my classmates had trouble with Calculus and they had to spend countless hours work after the school day ended. This teacher never left them. He was committed to the success of this students. It was his life. 

Teachers are special people. They are more influential in the development of a child’s intelligence and knowledge than nearly everyone else. We start with parenting before a child goes to school. Then we transition from preschool to grade school, to middle school, to high school and then to more serious learning either in the technical world or the academic world. Both of those paths of development are beneficial to society. The goal of the education system, in my mind, is to create work ready people for the business world, not JUST expand knowledge and learning. This is true whether that person becomes a doctor or plumber. 

Ed Gordon, President of the Imperial Consulting Group, a man who has devoted his life to teaching and education and employee development, has written around twenty books. The one that got my attention was titled Future Jobs, Solving the Employment Skills Crisis. He has written a series of papers on Job Shock, which we have published as blogs. He has pointed out something very significant to me. The First Industrial Revolution required reforms to the education system to create math and literacy. Prior to that we were hunters and gatherers and farmers. We are now in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We have the same need to reform education. We need stronger analytical skills; we need better communications skills and better critical thinking skills. 

That means teaching will have to change once again. 

Teaching will have to transition to something different. We have to continue fulfilling the traditional role of preparing children to be able to enter the workforce. However, we are also now facing the need to create an adult reeducation program. No longer will the skills we obtain before the age of twenty-five be sufficient for our typical career. Science and Technology and Computerization and Artificial Intelligence and other advances will make our skills obsolete. The education system will have to be able to provide updated skills so that people will continue to be employable. 

This creates a wonderful challenge for us all involved in helping people learn. 

Traditional education has had a teacher in the front of the room. What I have called the “sage on the stage.” This model requires physical plant, a school, with classrooms and teachers and in some models with a teacher’s aide. This is an expensive model. Further this model clearly doesn’t work with the world that we live in today. We should not leave any person behind in the world. That means that we cannot stay with the current model. We need to move to the internet to bring learning to a much broader audience. In different geographies, Africa and Asia, where we don’t have the infrastructure, we have no choice but to seek out alternatives. 

We have examples and models available to us today. For instance, we have a very accomplished scientist who teaches at MIT. His name is Eric Lauder. Dr. Lauder also happens to be an amazing teacher. And there are others around the world. Dr. Lauder teaches a class at MIT called “The Secret of Life.” He has cameras in his classroom that record the class. This class then is put up on the internet and is available to anyone who has access to a computer and the internet. The same curriculum, the same homework, the same everything. This is an example where you have a subject matter expert who is an exceptional teacher, available to the world. Imagine that. 

Our classes at Learning Without Scars are complicated. Most of us who started into training on the internet started with a slide show that is the foundation of any class that you are putting on with a group of people in the room with you as students. The transition is then to try and have audio tracks tied into the slides to portray the messages you would have just as if you were in a classroom. That is a typical internet-based class. We do it differently. 

We would like to believe that our structure is a complete class. Required reading that is followed with a quiz to prove that you understood the reading material. Each class is built as a series of videos consisting of slides, and audio tracks and film clips, complete with close captioning, wrapped up with a quiz at the end. We have five to ten segments in each class. The transition is easy to go from one segment to the next. Each student receives an email upon the completion of each segment. One class I completed recently had twenty emails. Then we have a final assessment for the class. You must achieve an 80% score on the final assessment to pass the class. Then we ask each student to complete a survey, to help us continue to improve our products, and finally the certificate of achievement. The certificate includes the number of CEU’s that are earned in the class and apply as academic classes in other schools. (Our CEUs apply to other schools; technical schools, Junior Colleges, State Universities and private Universities.) Our subject specific classes now “feel” like a school program, no longer an internet-based slideshow. 

This is part of what we foresee as the transition on education. The arrival of the internet as a learning platform. Of course, there will be many iterative changes, but we have to make higher quality learning available across the world to anyone who is interested not just those that can afford it.      

The Time is Now.

Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
For our course lists, please click here.

Learning As a Way of Life

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Learning As a Way of Life

In this week’s post on lifelong learning, Ron Slee tackles the difficulties of making time for ourselves in “Learning As a Way of Life.”

Should Learning be a Way of Life?

Over my career and involvement in training and teaching one thing has always stood out to me. The amount of time and effort that we devote in our lives to our own personal health and development seems always to come last. Imagine that. We spend our time working, in many cases the same job for years, and we don’t do much if anything to get to another level of opportunities.

A number of years ago my wife and I took a vacation. A nice vacation for a couple of weeks. During these two weeks, I spent each morning looking out at magnificent scenery while I was on a treadmill. That is when it struck me. I had not spent any time at all on my own personal health and wellbeing. I don’t think I am alone in this regard. We get into ruts in our lives. We have our personal lives and our professional lives and we get to a place where we have everything under control and we are comfortable with our lives. Or so we think.

So, when the vacation was over and we returned home I reverted to my normal life which left no time for me.

During the time I was teaching in a classroom, I always asked the class to tell me about the last book that they read. Rarely had anyone read a book in the last thirty days, or ninety days, a few had read a book in the past year. Does that remind you about the time I DON’T invest in myself? The people in my classes rarely did anything in the form of reading that helped them develop as individuals, either in their personal or professional lives.

I think it is long past the time when we should be investing in ourselves.

When I worked in dealerships, I regularly got a book for the members of my team. We all read the same book and set a day when we would talk about that book and share with each other our impressions. It was always enlightening to all of us. We were talking about our personal impressions, with no filters. No judgment, no one was right or wrong, we were just talking as people. I found that the team became much closer as a result of this exercise. You should try it, or something like it, with your teams. Maybe even in your family if your children are old enough.

Recently my granddaughter moved to Hawaii to take her Master’s Degree at the University of Hawaii. It is a real joy for us to have her this close. During the past six weeks or so we have spent a lot of time together and those of you who know me reasonably well can imagine the conversations we get into with each other. As you know I am a contrarian. I love debating. And it really doesn’t matter which side of the debate I am on. During this time my granddaughter has figured me out and we now can have some really vigorous debates about darn near any subject you want to talk about. That is also a joy for me as it shows me a person who is growing in their thinking and communications styles.  

Recently I was talking with the President of a University and I was asking him what he viewed as the most significant elements of learning that the students coming to university were lacking. He was very clear in those three things.

  1. Critical Thinking Skills
  2. Analytical Skills 
  3. Communications Skills

I was intrigued and we talked about it for some time. It would appear that when the US introduced the “No Child Left Behind” program, the teaching became more about teaching to a score on a test than teaching people to think. Of course, in some parts of the U.S., a low test score was grounds for firing a teacher. Learning the subject matter should be the primary objective, of course. Learning to think and develop your own intellect was also a priority. It would appear that aspect of learning was less prioritized in the face of so much high stakes testing. To this University Leader it showed.

I would like for us to get much more serious about our own personal development. As you know one of the goals for us at Learning Without Scars is to help everyone identify their individual personal potential. Then to get on a path to achieving our potential. That applies to all of us. Caroline and I are in this mode constantly. She is much more effective at it than I am as she has held a full-time teaching job while at the same time involved in personal development with a mentor once a week and completing her own Master’s program in education. I feel like a slacker beside her. But think about that for a moment. Caroline has put embedded learning in her life. 

Writing this blog has renewed my commitment to put learning into my day-to-day life. I read constantly. I recommend five books in each of our Quarterly Newsletters so each of you can be stimulated to do the same thing. The newsletters all have four main subject areas; parts, service, selling and business. They are in the form of a separate document which I wanted you to use for Continuous Improvement in your work.

I am very fortunate in that I am exposed to people that take me out of my comfort zone when I do Zoom calls and create our Podcasts and YouTube and Vimeo Films. I am challenged to explore a subject on which my guests are subject matter experts, and I have a conversation with them that can be helpful to our Learning Without Scars audience.

But I am entering a new phase in my life. It seems that the changes will never end. I am going to embed Learning into my day-to-day life, and I invite you to join me in this new phase.    

The Time is Now.

Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
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Does Anyone Know the Skills Required For a Job?

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Does Anyone Know the Skills Required For a Job?

When you first seek employment, do you know all of the ins and outs of the job you’re applying to do? Founder and managing member Ron Slee takes a look at skills in his learning post for this week: Does Anyone Know the Skills Required For a Job?

I have been manic about having Organizations Charts and Job Descriptions and Performance Metrics for Jobs for a long time. I have also always been able to have performance reviews with any teams that I led when I was an employee. For one-on-one discussions of performance reviews, I tried to put the employee at ease. I wanted us to be able to be completely honest with each other. It was reflected in my day-to-day activities as well. I was always “on the floor” walking around and talking with everyone. I guess I was interrupting their work but neither the employee nor I ever complained about my presence in their jobs and their lives. We were family from my perspective.

Today as I look around businesses today, I see organizations without inadequate numbers of employees. Push-push-push. More-more-more. People are complaining about the lack of loyalty that customers have toward their suppliers. I am constantly asked that question “What happened to loyalty?” The internet has changed everything. Many people today are writing about the problems with “WFH” – working from home. We have lost something that we will regret. I don’t agree with that comment at all. We are entering into a new era of work. Most small business has to have employees at work. At their place of business. They cannot work remotely at a coffee shop or a warehouse or a service shop. It is the  larger corporations that are having the problem with WFH. They don’t like it. They think that the “office” is where life happens. We work collaboratively. We make friends and have adversaries. Sometimes we meet someone that we will marry. Everything happens at the office. Isn’t that something?

Our lives and our society depend on us going to the office.     

WOW.

I truly hope that is not true. It is not true with what I do. It isn’t true with my daughter who teaches in the classroom. My grandchildren went to school virtually for nearly two school years. My granddaughter took advantage of it and loaded her schedule with the classes that would have been too far apart (distance-wise) for her to take back-to-back during her Undergraduate Degree. I don’t think that hurt her at all. I think it helped. My grandson learning virtually was something that he did better with than in the traditional classroom. There were fewer distractions. That would have been the same thing with me. Too many distractions. That is why I have been talking about a book titled “Indistractable.” How helpful that has been in how I organize my workload. But my grandson did very well with virtual learning.

Which brings me to what I wanted to talk about in this blog. Who has defined the job skills required for a job? I know. Education. Years of Experience.  Gets along well with others. The usual stuff. But what skills are required? Can they use the telephone effectively? Can they solve problems? Can they sell? Can they manage an inventory? Do they know how to set up a warehouse, a distribution center? Can they manage a shop floor? Do they have critical thinking skills? Do they have analytical skills? Can they communicate well in writing and orally? Do they have leadership skills? Who has defined and clearly described the specific job skills required for a job function? 

I will suggest to you most people think that those things are supposed to be handled in the interview. Alright I will go along with that for a moment. Who trained the person conducting the interview with the prospective employee? We have a problem here. In my opinion.

This shows itself up in our Job Function Skills Assessments. Experienced and talented people are surprised at their scores. The results that most people get are lower than what they thought they would be. When I discuss it with them, I ask them why they were surprised and they tell me that they do the job and have done the job for years. They are good at their job. They get promoted.

Let’s get specific then and talk about inventory management. I start by asking questions. They give me good answers. They think that they do a very good job. So, I ask them how long it takes to get a part. Their lead time. And everyone now, even during the troubles with the supply chain, says less than a month for most vendors. Then I ask if their inventory turnover is greater than eight times. They look at me as if I was from another planet. The point is that they have been doing the job that has always been done in the same manner. Is that what we want? What we need? Continuous Quality Improvement, CQI, seems have gone away for most of us. 

I do the same thing with people in the service department, or product support selling or parts and service marketing. And everyone that got a score lower than they expected. Our assessments are evaluating the skills that the employee has to have in order to be able to perform that particular job function. Not how the job is being done but rather what the job requires. Instore Selling is not Order Processing. Repairs are not conducted in a job shop it is a planned and scheduled repair facility. Marketing is not simply brochures and trade shows. It is everything and anything that influences the customer to purchase something from you.

That takes me to the title of this blog. 

We need to write a different description of what is expected of the employee in their specific job. That would help in every area of the employee – employer relationship. The trouble with this is the same as most other issues we face. We don’t have enough time to do it. We are not sure what the skills should be for that job. We hadn’t really thought about it before.

Think about this seriously. I sincerely believe it will make your life easier with each employee and it will really help the employee understand what is expected of them with more clarity. The employees will feel much better about themselves and what is expected of them. However, make no mistake, this is not easy to do. Perhaps that is why we haven’t done it before. It is too much like work.   

The Time is Now.

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Are Your Employees Assets OR simply Tools from a Toolbox?

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Are Your Employees Assets OR simply Tools from a Toolbox?

In this, the second installment in our series on learning and education, our founder and managing member Ron Slee asks a fundamental question: Are Your Employees Assets OR simply Tools from a Toolbox? Your answer determines how you approach the education of your team members.

One of the common issues that I have had to deal with since I first arrived in this industry is the cost of payroll. Payroll has traditionally been measured as a percentage of sales. We have a payroll of $1,000,000 and Sales of $10,000,000 so we have an expense sales ratio of 10%. I have always believed that is the improper way to be looking at your employees. I believe that your employees are in almost all cases revenue generators The employees are also the ones who develop the relationship with your customers that improves customer retention and satisfaction. 

One thing that I have found quite interesting over the years, when talking with very smart, experienced people, executives in charge of parts and service is how they have viewed employees. Several of them have expressed surprise when we discuss head counts. One Executive Vice president of a large major brand equipment manufacturer told me that every time he hired a new employee for his parts business the sales revenue for parts increased. He expressed how surprised he was. My answer? Keep on hiring at the rate at which your business can absorb new employees until the sales do not go up.

Many of you are aware that I use a sales per employee metric that is based on three variables; the gross profit of parts, the compensation package for the parts department, and the average unit price for the parts sold. From this you can arrive at a specific standards dollar value for a parts department employee. Let’s use $750,000/parts person, excluding the management. We use that measure over a rolling twelve-month time period. I use a bracket around that standard, 80% as a floor and 120% as a ceiling. When we have three consecutive months below the 80% of standard level, we have to reduce the number of employees. When we have three consecutive months above 120% of the standard level, we have to increase the number of employees.      

Is there anything wrong with that approach?

The same thing is true with technicians as well as the teams that sell equipment, parts and service or rentals. There are dollar standards for all of these job functions. That is also true about the administrative job functions.

I still find it interesting how many of the leaders of businesses in most capital goods industries look at a high sales per employee as a positive thing, and I understand that very well. However, we can easily be misled with that approach. Nothing is ever that simple, is it? 

Yes, a high sales per employee number provides higher levels of profitability for the business. That is clearly one of the metrics that owners are concerned with for their business. However, there are other factors that cannot be overlooked. 

Over the past 50 years market share has decreased. For parts and service, it has gone down by over 50%. Is there a correlation that we should be concerned about here? I think so.

Looking back at the past forty years we have had a relatively stable situation with interest rates and inflation. We all became accustomed to the way we needed to operate the business. Of course, there some variations but they, for the most part they have been of a short duration. Then the pandemic hit and we were forced to adapt how the business operated.

From January 2020 as a starting point until the end of June 2022 both employees and employers were forced to rethink a lot of things. Office spacing, masks, vaccines, working from home and many other adjustments were made. Education had a very serious change forced upon it. Virtual learning became commonplace. The teachers and schools, the School Boards and Teachers Unions all were forced into serious changes. Caroline taught from home for over a year. The results determined from surveys of scores and grades are not very good. The learners in K-12 have lost in some states as much as a year in their learning results. As a society we will be paying a price for that loss of learning for decades.

Today as the employees and employers reevaluate their work and operating methods, we are noticing big, significant changes. In many cases positive ones. These changes would have taken place naturally anyway at some point. However, the changes this time were compressed over a very short period of time.

Now we are confronted with the question in the headline at the top of this blog. Do you view your employees as tools from a toolbox that you can deploy to satisfy a job function need OR are they assets that drive your business?

I think you know where I stand on that question. What about you?       

The Time is Now.

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What Benefits Are YOU Going to Receive from Learning?

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What Benefits Are YOU Going to Receive from Learning?

Founder and managing member Ron Slee invites readers to start their education in “What Benefits Are YOU Going to Receive from Learning?”

I think most of us can remember our regular school years. I know that I can remember mine very clearly. I have written about them here before, but today I wanted to bring YOU back into learning and explore the differences time and technology have made for us.

Those of you who know the Learning Without Scars story know that we began our employee development in traditional, in-person classrooms when we were still organized as Quest Learning Centers. We adopted the webinar format in order to make education more accessible, and then adopted the asynchronous, online classroom. I like to point out that we did this long before the pandemic began, so we were early adopters.

Most adults I speak to have had a negative experience with education. After all, if you think about it, Kindergarten through Grade 12 education doesn’t give you, the student, very much in the way of choice. By the time we establish ourselves in our profession, we have the added pressure of expectation. We are expected to know what we are doing, all of the ins and outs, in many cases without a great deal of training.

Education has changed dramatically. As educators, we have a lot more research on how to deliver learning to improve results. Lecture times and quizzes and other devices to improve learning and retention have seen changes recently. Technology has helped tremendously as the students in the lecture halls have cellular phones or tablets or laptops with them. The professors and teachers can post a quiz question on the screen or white board and get instant feedback from the students on whether or not they are “getting” it. 

My daughter Caroline has a Master of Education Degree. I taught people how to teach at university for six years. We have a little experience in the world of teaching, in addition to having front row seats to all of the changes in education over decades. We started the search to find a good source, widely respected and international to provide some level of certification. Caroline found the International Association of Continuing Education and Training – IACET. She then put together the application for Learning Without Scars to become an Approved Provider. This allowed us to provide Continuous Education Units – CEUs to our successful students. CEUs are education credits that are applicable to qualified institutions from technical schools, junior colleges and universities world- wide. It was quite a journey and serious challenge to satisfy all of the IACET requirements. In November 2021 we became the only Approved Supplier in the Construction Equipment Industry World-Wide to have this accreditation. We are very pleased with that.   

Albert Einstein once said, “When you stop learning, you start dying.”

I’m pretty sure that isn’t an outcome we want, is it? My hope is to shift your thinking about learning. My goal as a teacher has always been to help students to identify and access their potential. My role is to facilitate YOUR growth and help you to reach YOUR goals.

We built our Learning: On Demand courses to bring the classroom to you and remove the hoops many adult learners have to jump through in order to incorporate classes or training into their already busy schedules.

So, as we start this new series of posts on the subject of education and learning, I have a series of questions for you to ask of yourself. It’s just a simple way of taking stock, in order to better plan for what you want to be learning.

  1. What is your current role?
  2. What are your likes and dislikes about it?
  3. Where do you see yourself in 1 year? 5 years? 10 years?
  4. What would help you to be successful in reaching your goals?

Learning is simply a way for you to unlock your potential, and the opportunities that come from growing and developing your skills and knowledge.

The time is now.

Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
For our course lists, please click here.

 

 

The Sage on the Stage

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The Sage on the Stage

This week our founder and managing member, Ron Slee, asks us to take a moment to remember and wonder about the sage on the stage. Where are they now?

I started teaching children at a country club when I was a teenager. I taught people how to swim. I did that every summer from the time I was 14 until I had to get a real job in business. During my teaching of athletics, I ended up teaching at McGill University in Montreal. I was teaching students who were getting a degree in athletics. I was asked to develop a coaching and training program as well as water safety. I had classes three night a week. Half was in a classroom and half was in the pool. I loved it. I guess I am a teacher at heart as I truly love to see the lights go on in people’s eyes when they “get it.”

The classroom was long and relatively thin. It had a raised dais in the front of the room with a wall-to-wall black board. A stage. I was never comfortable with that situation so I started what a has become a habit of wandering around through the desks and among the students. Then recently I ran across the title of the blog “A sage on the stage.”

It was an interesting paper that was addressing the exclusive nature of education at University. The paper talked about the thirty-one million people in the US between the ages of 18 and 24. Thirteen million of them are current undergraduates; almost three quarters of them are enrolled in four-year-degree programs. The article also pointed out that 0.2% of the 18-to-24-year-old population was enrolled in Ivy league schools. 63,000 students.

Society at large as well as educators and legislators have been struggling with this problem for some time. Inertia is hard to overcome. Everyone in America is aware of the student debt problem. There are many issues to be faced in solving this problem. One of them is that trade schools fight with liberal arts schools for funding. This should not be a zero-sum game.

Looking at the structure today shows most classes have between three and four credit hours. A semester “load” is 12 to 18 credit hours and lasts for 15 weeks. Each year is two semesters and four years is what is required to earn a degree. That structure has been around for a long, long time. Many don’t think that is works in today’s world. Further information comes from a study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. They tested 2,300 students and found that after first and second years 45% and found that once after four years they demonstrated no improvements in key areas including writing and critical thinking.

They believe, as we do at Learning Without Scars (LWS), that Lifelong Learning needs to help people move in and out of the classroom. In fact, we should be creating and experimenting with dozens of new models to keep the workforce and the new entrants to the workforce in a position that they have skills that apply to the ever-changing workplace.

One of the thoughts on changing learning is to have three staggered 12-to-18 months of learning and work interspersed. This is similar to how many technical school programs work today. Western University in Canada has had this type of program for decades. It works.

One of the missing pieces, in my opinion is that we do not have enough advising and mentoring in education and career selections. We also need to have much more intensive internships and career development available to students and parents. As we have found at LWS learners benefit from more frequent, low-stakes real time individual assessments and quizzes interspersed in learning programs. This type of constant assessment and quiz changes how a student learns and enables more serious concentration on the material being presented by teachers. There is an awareness that the usual checking-in and checking-out listening and learning that has become the norm with a fifty minute or longer class doesn’t work and the students learn with very quickly with constant quizzes and assessment through learning experience.

This also leads to more awareness at the student and business level of the need for constant learning and relearning of skills and knowledge. Those of you who follow our blogs know that Ed Gordon has made a pronouncement that 50% of the current American work force will not have the skills required to hold and keep a job by 2030. That, if it becomes true, which is quite likely will mean very radical changes in the American society. How can the American education system, business community, and state and federal taxation handle such a situation?

Many people have written on this subject most recently is Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska who was once a University President. This is a very serious situation and one that needs much more debate and thought. 

 The Time is Now.

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It Is Time to Fail Faster

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It Is Time to Fail Faster

Founder and Managing Member Ron Slee shares words of wisdom he heard recently in today’s blog post: It Is Time to Fail Faster.

I never thought that I would call for “failing faster” in my life. Imagine failure? Of course, if we think about this, a moment’s failure is important to anyone who is interested in getting better at how they do things. 

I was given this “line” by Stephanie Smith, Vice President of Marketing from Newman Tractor on a recent Podcast with Mets Kramer. We were talking about Marketing and the Digital Dealership and how fast change was happening. Stephanie calmly stated that we have to learn how to fail faster. I stopped her and asked her to repeat it. I found it to be so profound. Days later, to me it is still a very profound observation.

I was in school in the 1950s and the 1960s. It was a very basic education. Nothing particularly fancy. Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. My Mother was a teacher, she was the Vice Principal at the grade school I attended. She chose all my teachers. I couldn’t get away with anything. My Grandmother was a teacher in the proverbial one room schoolhouse. She got a Master’s degree from the University of Manitoba in the early 1900s. One year I was doing miserably in Geometry and Latin. I hated studying so I refused to memorize. I either understood it or I felt it was not that important. My Grandmother took over my schooling on the weekends. I spent several months with her every weekend. The first semester I got 38% in both Geometry and Latin. That was unacceptable to Granny. By the final report card, I averaged 78% for the year. I had no choice but to stop failing. I was “taught” a very important lesson that year. It wasn’t “don’t mess with Granny.” No, it was “apply yourself or there will be a consequence.” Did I ever learn! That, plus my experiences in the swimming pool as a competitive swimmer, made me who I became.

That led me to my favorite question: “Why?” It seems from a very young age I was always asking why. Perhaps every child does. But that meant I would try things. That was when I started experiencing failure. I remember one instance when I was doing some work in the warehouse at the Caterpillar dealership in Montreal. I think we were moving parts around trying to make more space. Bob Hewitt, the dealer principal, came out to the warehouse and put his arm around my shoulders. I was surprised. Here I was in a sweat shirt and jeans working and dirty in the warehouse. He was in a three-piece suit looking very elegant. He looks me in the eye and says “I am really disappointed in you.” Even in those early years I was rarely at a loss for words. I quickly responded “me too. Why are you disappointed?” I looked up at him and I could see his face start to twitch. He said “when you are finished come see me in my office.” The thing he was disappointed in was that the roads to a remote branch were closed for the winter and I had placed a stock order that wasn’t going to get there. I hadn’t planned for an early snowfall. I told him if I would have known that snowfall was coming, could have predicted that, I would be working somewhere else. True story.

I have made an unbelievable number of mistakes over the course of my lifetime. They continue even today. The trick with mistakes from my perspective is very simple. You are going to make mistakes, that is clear, identify the mistakes as quickly as you can and make adjustments, corrections, fix it. Fast. Today with the rate of change in society, in technology, in telecommunications, in fact in nearly every aspect of our lives is dramatic. Change is coming at us so fast it is impossible to keep up. At least that is true for me.

When Stephanie made the comment, we have to “fail faster” I was amazed. It was so appropriate. It was profound to me. It was an “aha” moment. It forced me to think about things again in a new way. I needed to pick up my pace and make more changes more quickly. Don’t worry about making mistakes. Don’t worry about failure. That is going to be a consequence of doing more things. Mistakes and failures are also a part of the process of learning. You just have to recognize when things don’t work and make adjustments. Make corrections. Everything will continue to be alright. No one is going to shoot me. At least, not for making a mistake. 

Thank you, Stephanie.    

The Time is Now.

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How Do We Find Our Individual Potential?

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How do we find our individual potential? 

As many of you know, the primary purpose of our Learning Without Scars business is to help people find their personal potential. That confuses a lot of people. Most of us don’t have any idea of our potential. Early on in civilization it was quite basic and very simple – to have the strength to be able to find and get food. We were hunters and gatherers. If we couldn’t find food, we died. Simple, right?

Today it is much more complicated. Governments are determined not to have people die from lack of food. We have many social programs to ensure that people will have access to the basic requirements of life. Even in these advanced times, we have many who choose to stay off the grid for one reason or another.

In the United States in 2020, about 18% of the population was under 15 years old; 65% from 15 years old to 64 years old; and 17% over 65 years old. I believe that understanding our potential changes with our age. It varies as we get older. One of the definitions of potential causes me some difficulty. It is the “possibility of becoming something more.” Isn’t that always the case? Aren’t we constantly learning things? Another definition is “coming to self-realization that there is more to our lives.” This definition gets rather personal for me. One day, while my father was still alive, we were having a glass of “brown water” and solving the problems of the world, he paused and looked at me and said “I don’t understand you. You are never satisfied.” I responded quickly with the blithe comment “well there is always more, isn’t there?”

And that becomes the challenge of potential. There is always something more.

One of my grandchildren is in High School and we were talking about what he wanted to do with his life. He said, “I don’t know.” It is a terrific answer for someone in High School today. There are so many choices available to us. There are the sciences and the fantastic developments being made within them. The arts and the various media – sculpture and painting – as well various methods to express ourselves visually. Music and literature and drama. Fashion and Makeup. I might add that many of the early school years tend to “stifle” creativity not “encourage” it. How do you start in finding this something “more?”

Well, how about starting with those things that do not turn you on? These are the things that you don’t like to do. In 1998 Sir Ken Robinson led a commission created by the government in the UK – “Commission on creativity, education and the economy.” It turns out he was highly critical of the education system under which he was taught. He regretted the fact that neither the primary school, secondary school nor college enabled people to develop their talents and discover what they really wanted to devote themselves to in their lives. Doesn’t that condition still exist where you live? Where you went to school, or your children and grandchildren are going to school? Where are we supposed to find this magic “thing” to which we want to devote our lives?          

This is a difficult undertaking, isn’t it? This pursuit of our potential. How about we look at the other side of the question. What don’t we want to do? What aren’t we very good at in our lives? Sometimes that is easier to identify.

  1. What was something you disliked studying?
  2. What were some jobs you hated?
  3. What are some of the household chores you really don’t like doing?

Isn’t there anything common in the items above? 

  1. Are they some activities you do alone or without somebody else?
  2. Does someone tell you to do these tasks or does it depend only on you?
  3. Do the activities need something physical or intellectual?

Now let’s make another list.

Write down everything you like or liked to do in the areas below: 

  1. School or Education
  2. Jobs
  3. Everyday tasks

Now find the common denominator in these items.

Have you stopped any of these activities you enjoyed? 

  1. Why?
  2. Can you recover it and start it again?

Now let’s rank the things you liked to do.

  1. What is in first place?
  2. Can you make it more prominent in your life?

Some things should now be standing out. Things should be clearer.

Now comes a big question. I think it will have become clearer to you. You know better now some of the things you want to do. So, let’s ask that magic question? What have you always wanted to do but were afraid to start doing it? Do you think it is time to start doing it? That is the beginning of your potential. The possibility of becoming something more. Are you ready to get started?

The Time is Now.

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Our Winsby Announcement

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Our Winsby Announcement

Founder and Managing Member Ron Slee makes our Winsby announcement today, describing the new link between our two companies and where readers can learn more about this.

We are pleased to announce a change in our relationship with Winsby. 

Winsby, which is a Colleague of Learning Without Scars, has now tied their website to ours. This completes the cross connection with Learning Without Scars. We are listed as an Affiliate on their website. You can find us by going to their website at https://www.winsbyinc.com/about-us.html

Winsby has been helping equipment dealers grow for over fifteen years. By analyzing the dealer’s customers’ invoices, Winsby easily identify the marketing efforts that work well. As a result, only effective programs are included in ongoing programs. The goal is always to increase revenue as efficiently as possible.

With specialists in every essential marketing area, Winsby offers a complete range of services. On staff are researchers, writers, designers, programmers, list specialists, financial analysts, videographers, account managers, and a group of skilled callers. After analyzing your invoices, Winsby will recommend and implement a program that keeps your business growing steadily.

Please visit their website for more information.

The time is now.

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