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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.

A Great Idea on Learning from a Customer.

Many of you know that we, at Learning Without Scars, are very supportive of new and improved approaches we could be taking with our training platform. That is how we have developed from Management Training, that we first offered with Quest Learning Centers in the early 1990s, to the four different approaches we have in Learning Without Scars; The Learning On Demand Program (LOD), The Planned Specific Programs (PSP), The Virtual Classroom (VCR) and the Planned Learning Programs (PLP).

 

Recently we were approached about an idea a client had who is the Director of Operations of a Bobcat dealership. This talented lady asked if anyone had approached the LOD programs as part of a monthly department learning plan. Of course, at that point no-one had suggested this to us or discussed it with us.

 

She wanted to have each of their stores take the same LOD class. At the end of the month, after everyone had completed the program, they would have a Skype Call or a GoToMeeting and talk about the program of that month. That way each team Member and their Manager would have a clear view of where everyone stood on the knowledge scale. They would have a common understanding of what was expected and share common jargon in communications.

 

What a great idea!

 

They had ten stores with each store having one in-store sales person who handled everything; parts and supplies and rentals. They would get a membership for each store ($50.00/store – total $500.00) and then everyone in the store could take classes for the member pricing. An individual LOD is $115.00/student So if there were one person in each store the monthly training cost would be $1,150.00.

 

She thought that they should take the PSP – Planned Specific Program – which covers four individual classes – but do the classes once a month together. That then morphed into a specifically designed program of LOD’s as she saw the need. This would allow her to create a “personalized” learning program for her business and her teams. What do you think about that?

 

The Time is NOW.