Posts

Find and Develop Skills

/in , /by

Find and Develop Skills

Founder and Managing Member Ron Slee writes about how we can find and develop the skills we need in life. He brings the idea of Ikigai to bear on this crucial and timely subject.

How do we find and develop the skills to provide us the best possible life? 

I have written often about happiness. From the philosopher Tom Morris and his book Plato’s Lemonade stand to The Art of Happiness at Work it is clear I want people to be happy in their lives. This I find out is a Japanese word – Ikigai. It is a word that is the meaning of life. It is what gets you out of bed in the morning.

Ikigai is the center of a circle that touches on four basic elements.

 

This is a very simple graphic, isn’t it? I would like everyone to be doing what they love, what they are good at and what the world needs. And clearly you need to be paid for it. 

One of my first clients in 1980 was a cancer survivor. His name was Ron Miller. He was an extraordinary man in his early 30’s who gave Caterpillar fits. He was the largest broker of Caterpillar equipment in the world. He hired me to put him in the parts and service business so that he could feel he was a pseud CAT Dealer. He was quite force. My family and I were living in Vancouver, BC and I was working for Finning Tractor. I was effectively, or not, running the parts business for them in British Columbia and the Yukon Territory. We had fifty-three stores then and my job had become babysitting and politics and I neither liked nor was I any good at either. Ronnie successfully lured me away and that was the beginning of my consulting life. I remember as if it were yesterday sitting at the poolside in his building with my wife and daughter Caroline who was about four years old at the time. Ronnie had lost a leg to cancer and Caroline was fascinated with the “six-dollar man.” 

I have met many gifted people in my life and Ronnie Miller was clearly one of them. He once told me that there were three words that he used to quide his life. Happiness, Effectiveness and Making Money. He said each day he tried to be happy and be effective and make money. I have never forgotten that lesson.

I am not as successful at living u0p to that as I would like but I continue to try. Notice he said “effective” not efficient. Two different words. He was all about doing the right thing. Not doint things right. That is a very telling statement. It fits into my mantra of doing your best, doing wha is right and honoring the golden rule. Simple things.

But let us return to Ikigai.

  • What You love to do REQUIRES Passion and Mission.
  • What The World Needs REQUIRESs Mission and Vocation.
  • What You can be paid for REQUIRES Professionalism and Vocation.
  • What You are Good at REQUIRES Passion and Professionalism. 

The British journalist Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Outliers. In it he proposed that it takes 10,000 hours to be good at something and succeed at whatever it is. Aristotle said “We are what we do repeatedly.” There are many wonderful books written around the same theme. I was a swimmer in my youth. I swam hours and hours each day for years to get good at it. And I did get good at it.

When I started at a Caterpillar Dealership in Quebec, Canada, in 1969 I had the Senior partner from a consulting company spend one day a week, all day with just me, to show me and teach me about inventory management and systems. I had a passion to get good at what I did. Ad I did get good at it.

Along the way I had very talented people step up and help me get better at everything I did. Bob Kirk who was the “guru” of inventory management for Caterpillar took me under his wing. Larry Noe, one of the founders of Caterpillar Dealer Data Processing di the same. I don’t know why they did that but they did. Similarly, although later Roger Fay, who was responsible for the Caterpillar parts business in “Caterpillar Americas,” Canada, Mexico, Central and South America did the same. I will never forget those men. The truly “paid it forward.”      

So, what was my passion? To do the right thing and to do things right. It started with swimming and my coach would watch where I put my hand in the water and wasn’t happy until I did it right. It continues today with everyone who influences my thinking about doing everything I do a little bit better. The “Kaizen” way.  

That takes me to Professionalism. That is tough. It is a matter of opinion. I hate that. I don’t like opinions I like facts. 

But let’s look at professionalism.

Professionals are:

  • Competent
  • Reliable
  • Communicate well
  • Poised
  • Ethical
  • Organized
  • Accountable

As a consultant I have to be viewed by my clients in a specific manner:

  • I have to have oral and written skills
  • I have to have observation skills
  • I have to have problem solving skills
  • I have to have people skills
  • I have to have organizational skills
  • I have to have time management skills
  • I have to be objective
  • I have to be independent.

Once have become established I have to have references that will attest to my skills. That is my professionalism.

Let’s return one more time to Ikigai.

I am passionate about what do. It shows. I love it.

I have a mission. I have goals and purpose.

I have to be professional.

I have to make money.

In my life, professionally and personally I live Ikigai. I would hope that each of you would be in the same place. It is not easy and there are many roadblocks. But don’t give up. It is worth the pain and struggle to get there. I promise you that once you get there you will be happy and life and long and fruitful life.  

The Time is Now.

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

     

 

Training Develops Skills That Can Be Measured

/in , , /by

Training develops skills that can be measured.

Guest writer Natalia Dmitrenko continues to build from the foundation of last week’s blog post, “Loyal Staff” with her exploration of the skills that training develops. Each of these skills can be measured.

Any corporate training initiatives have a similar purpose: evaluation of the difference in the performance of staff before and after the training took place. That way the company gets a much better picture of all the benefits or potential drawbacks which come with any L&D training.

But if you’d look at the other side of the coin, you’d see that developing effective training mechanisms that would provide up-to-date data about the gaps in knowledge and skills within the departments can be time consuming and rather costly.

Good news is that collaboration with e-learning platforms doesn’t mean companies have to invest tons of funds in training since there are already-made training solutions available. Luckily there are some tools that provide good assistance for these kinds of compliance training. One is Grinfer for Business that offers a training platform that takes the stress out of learning. Participants can log in from anywhere and on-the-go because it’s incredibly mobile. Person can watch one course or even a lesson per day and he/she is done. It’s almost like checking your Instagram, but more informative and career related.

Grinfer for Business is not only about the value-adding L&D activities but is also about performance metrics which can be now implemented easier, thanks to online technologies. This e-learning solution effectively builds a continuous cycle of learning with easy access on-demand not just to career related courses but also to a wide library of content for “your body and soul”. Or, in other words, things that are fun to learn in your spare time.

Business teams get instant access to free live webinars and masterclasses on any topic from top instructors, 1,200+ online courses, workshops, access to authors’ blogs, personalized learning paths/curriculum, and much more. Here learning is not a part of the job, it is mixed with enjoyment of learning something new about the stuff that you love to do outside of your job.

An experience shows that whenever a company builds a continuous cycle of learning, this will not only contribute to a corporate culture across the SME. It also adds a competitive edge that encourages staff in a good way to become more productive and efficient. However, everything really depends on the type of company’s training initiative.

For example, a good showcase of such team training would be collaboration in 2021 with a middle-sized IT company called Severex. Initially, this company’s goal was to find a highly efficient e-learning solution that would work well for upskilling company’s work teams with on-demand skills upgrades, rapid upskilling, and reskilling.

Since Grinfer for Business also engages teams by continuously measuring students’ progress/learning outcomes, after about 3 months of training, Grinfer has collected feedback from the Severex learning teams about their personal learning experiences, insights, achievements, success stories, and any drawbacks that they’ve faced along the way. The survey responses indicated that learning paths correlated with employee engagement which boosted productivity and the effectiveness of teams.

At the same time, this training initiative has built a stronger team spirit and contributed to maintaining a healthy corporate culture across the business. Severex employees, who took part in team learning, have admitted that the learning experience positively influenced their overall job satisfaction. And that most of them felt like the company does a good job in taking care of their needs.

Many respondents admitted that most upgrades they received on hard and soft skills were useful and helped them find new creative outlets for scaling and accomplishing set goals more effectively. By the end of the training cycle, the overall productivity of Severex staff had ticked up to about 15%. At the same time, interaction with the Grinfer for Business platform has ramped up showing the increase of 30%.

In addition, Severex’s HRs were provided with enough data (accumulated from the Grinfer’s custom reports and learners’ engagement rates) for finding better ways to develop long-term learning paths that wouldn’t demand costly investments. And, at the same time, would increase the absorption rate, break the daily routine, and boost employees’ loyalty.

Taking into account that retention rates and employees’ loyalty to a place of hire are the two pressing issues (since the cost of employee turnovers can be high), this puts L&D training programs in a high priority list of organizational charts. And if a company’s staff is filled with people who are always up for learning – always is a good sign.

Coping with today’s already accepted “new normals”, companies start to realize that using e-learning platforms for corporate training provide many undoubtful benefits due to its incredible flexibility, mobility, and accessibility. Some companies go for external e-learning resources like LMS or eLearning marketplaces that are available now for both, individual and group training sessions.

Some prefer to stick to blended learning, which could be the best choice too since it’s also highly effective and also less costly. And saving money is what most companies want in the current realities caused by the global pandemic.

Corporate training delivered via e-learning platforms may still raise some contradictions. The main concern is that you can motivate employees with proper training and you can kill your employees’ motivation with improper ways of training. However, with the rapidly growing popularity of the eLearning industry, investing time, money, and efforts into adequate online educational resources is one of the smartest decisions that business teams can come up with today.

Find more info on how we can help at Grinfer website.

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

 

The Future Work Place

/in , , /by

The Future Work Place

The Future Work Place – What Will it Look Like?

The Pandemic has had a devastating impact on life around the world. Many of us have lost close friends, co-workers, associates and family members. It has been very personal. On top of that many of us have had either short term or long-term changes in our jobs as well as in the nature of our work. And interestingly some of us have reevaluated our lives and how we live them. It has been a very dramatic change in almost all of what we got used to prior to the Pandemic.

Now I have questions. What will be the future of our work? Will we work from home or in the office, or some hybrid? Obviously, technology will play a much larger role in our work and home lives. We can already see rather stark statistics. Ed Gordon has been publishing and providing us with blogs called Job Shock. He is pointing to the difficulties that the education work is having providing work ready people to the work place. Education has changed and is undergoing serious challenges where standardized testing is going away and not being used by universities for admission purposes in many cases. The value provided by the ACT and SAT tests and even Briggs-Myers are being challenged. Diversity issues have become much more important in the work place. Demographics are working against us as baby boomers are leaving the work force. Then we see an amazing fact: currently there are ten million job openings in the US, which is more than the total number of unemployed people looking for work. So yes, I do have questions.

Even before the pandemic things were changing but it was slow, as in most changes. Four-day work weeks were becoming more common. Second and even Third shifts were becoming more common in distribution and other Industries that had not seen much in the way of the shift world. The generational stress between the baby boomers who expected people working in the office was pitted against the Millennials and GenX who wanted the opportunity to work remotely.

A recent Gallup survey found that 40% of the US workforce was actively looking for a change in their jobs. The main reason being that the employees did not feel engaged. Into that mix comes the Society for Human Resource Management. They are suggesting that flexible work arrangement can provide several advantages.

  • Improved Employee Retention
  • More Success in Recruiting
  • Reduced Hiring and Training Expenses
  • Improved Employee Productivity
  • More Diversity in the Workforce
  • Increased Employee Engagement

Harvard Business School, in recent research, found that 81% of employees either didn’t want to go back to the office or would prefer a hybrid schedule going forward. So, we are going through another change where business will have to support employees who can and want to work at home.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s when the rate of change was slower employers were able to find the required skills outside the company and hire the skills required. That is no longer the case. Yet many companies are still in denial and refuse to spend money training their current employees.

Then the recent McKinsey Global Survey states that 69% of the reported respondents reported an increase in skill building. This pandemic has disrupted the skills foundation dramatically and companies are starting to acknowledge that they need to build new skills internally. Skills are lacking in empathy and leadership, adaptability and communications and problem solving. Critical thinking skills are seriously missing. According to Deloitte it can cost six times more to hire externally than to develop skills by training internally.

All of this is pointing to a serious challenge to our leaders. One that they have not had to face and deal with in their careers. The most important asset in any business is their employees. Yet this is the one asset that leadership has completely disregarded. They hire people and then leave them alone. If the skills required are no longer available, they get rid of the current worker and hire new people. It has been true and, in their minds, working for over three decades. This is no longer working. It should never have been the strategy. People are the most important asset in any way you look at it. And please don’t forget that this need for employee development is at every level in a business, from the owner to the least important job function.

I have advocated for years that we have skill sets tied to job functions. We put our assessment programs in place specifically to address this issue. We also wanted depth charts like in sports. Who is in line to follow the current leadership? We wanted succession planning. We also wanted annual performance reviews. These reviews allow positive discussions with each employee to determine the needs and wants of each employee. They provide an audience for discussions on continuous improvement. We have a lot of talent in our employees. Everyone of them. You all know I am interested in helping people identify their potential and then help everyone achieve that potential.

We must get going. Time is passing. And time is an element we don’t get back.

The Future Workplace will embrace new thinking. It will experiment more. We will try things. We have to make more progress in improving everything we do for our employees and our customers and our suppliers. We have to provide an environment where everyone wants to learn. We have to stop reacting and start innovating. We need to be able to adapt more readily. Some people call it agility. I call it basic common sense.

As a teacher I have always said common sense isn’t particularly common. Today we have a huge opportunity to turn the negativity since March 2020 into a positive response. Making the future of our desires and abilities. Are you ready?

The Time is Now.

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

Skills Assessments – An Update

/in /by

Skills Assessments – An Update

You might have noticed we have refreshed our Learning Without Scars web site. This the first phase of the changes we have planned. The goal of this phase was simplification. At the bottom of the landing page there are two symbols; One is a question mark and the other is a graphic of a computer terminal. The question mark denotes our assessments.

Due to the wonderful response we have had from many of you, we have expanded our assessment offerings. We now cover most of the job functions in the construction industry.

In the Parts Business we cover:

  1. Counter and Telephone Sales
  2. Parts Office
  3. Parts Warehouse
  4. Inventory Management
  5. Purchasing and Expediting

In the Service Business we cover:

  1. Foremen
  2. Inspectors
  3. Lead Hands
  4. Service Office
  5. Technical Communicator

In Sales and Marketing, we cover:

  1. Product Support Selling
  2. Product Support Sales Back Office
  3. Parts and Service Marketing

In Leadership we cover:

  1. Parts Management
  2. Service Management
  3. Product Support Sales Management

And for Technicians we cover:

  1. Construction Industry Technician
  2. Rental Industry Technician

You will also notice there are two columns on the right-hand side, one for Spanish and the other for French. We have eight assessments available for both languages. Go ahead and “Click” on the Question Mark on the bottom of the page, or the Assessment tab on the banner, and explore what we have to offer you on assessments.

Oh, and by the way, you can register and pay and get started online now. You don’t even need to talk to anyone. Of course, if you do, we are here waiting.

The Time is Now.