Read the latest insights from Dr. Guilkey and the S4 Netquest team.
I have written before in this blog about some of the unique needs when it comes to corporate education programs and millennials. As you already know, they matter greatly to your ability to succeed, for they make up nearly half of the workforce today. In past posts, I’ve stressed two primary things: 1) that you […]
One of the fundamental principles behind the development of M-Pact Learning was applying a detailed understanding of how people learn. That’s been missing in most corporate training and explains why most companies don’t gain a competitive advantage from their learning programs. The belief has long been that over time some of your employees have emerged […]
Many years ago, I was a professor at Ohio State University teaching flight education. It was there that I began to understand how people learn and saw that if the approach to learning was carefully designed and the quality was high, you could create better pilots faster. Along the way, I took a lot of […]
In business, we all recognize that if you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it. It’s an important but simple principle. It’s like if you’re trying to lose weight but never step on a scale, how do you know if you are succeeding? A similar belief has always dominated education. When teaching, we really do […]
It’s impossible in the midst of COVID-19’s worsening grip to discuss education and not hear the phrase “blended learning”. In K-12 and higher education, blended learning typically refers to a mix of in-person and remote learning approaches. Blended learning has always been an important part of the M-Pact Learning approach we take to corporate learning. […]
If you follow this blog regularly, you have read about how M-Pact Learning outperforms traditional training. Along the way, you have learned a good deal about why it can create a competitive advantage. If you are new to the blog, today’s edition offers a good introduction to M-Pact Learning. I’ll be sharing why works and […]
I have no doubt that if you were to give me a tour of your company’s offices, we would encounter countless examples of team members engaged in collaborative pursuits. And we would both fully recognize the many benefits that emerge from such collaboration: spread workload, greater innovation, built-in quality control and accountability, flexibility, and, of […]
Let’s say you’re trying to improve your golf game. Your instincts (or maybe your post-golf moods) tell you that you’re losing ground. Your friends say you’re improving. If you don’t keep score, you can’t really know which is true, right? One of the oldest adages in business is: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t […]
Tell me if you haven’t had a colleague or a teacher who is enamored with PowerPoint. You know the type. They not only use every excuse to put the most mundane material on a slide, they seem to believe that shooting stars and dramatic fades can make up for mediocre content. Sadly, you probably have […]
In the early pages of my book M-Pact Learning: The New Competitive Advantage, I included a quiz for my readers to assess how their companies were doing when it comes to meeting the critical learning needs of their employees. It’s a simple quiz, measured 1-5 on a gradient. For the question: “What is the role […]
If you’re like most people, things that you know you need to do—like going to the gym—can be hard, and the work-outs themselves can feel endless. But find yourself in a pick-up basketball game on the driveway court with your kids, or in a fast-paced doubles game and you probably don’t view it as working […]
The famous quotation from Heraclitus is “The only constant in life is change.” Substitute “business” for “life” and the quotation remains equally applicable. When you are focused on gaining a competitive advantage, you have to constantly look to place yourself ahead of the curve. Predicting the future can be hit or miss, but we have […]
Learning doesn’t stop at the classroom door. Even if you have the best instructional design imaginable and even if you see all your employee’s learning metrics skyrocket, if you want them to become experts, you have to support them after the course ends. What S4 NetQuest supplies after the course is what we call performance […]
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes, “the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.” This observation is part of Gladwell’s larger assertion, drawing on research subjects as varied as world chess masters to classical […]
Going back further than I might care to admit, my very first foray into the world of learning design was by teaching future commercial airline pilots how to fly by employing flight simulators. I gained a bit of notoriety in flight training circles by speaking at conferences on a topic that challenged a core notion […]
Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher said, “Change is the only constant in life.” He may have lived long before Plato or Aristotle, but his words feel like they belong to the present. As much energy as we devote to trying to predict the future in order to place our businesses in front of the pack, we […]
Every once in a while, the universe conspires to give business leaders reminders that they need employees who are fast on their feet when encountering new challenges and new problems. We’ve all had plenty of those reminders during the Coronavirus pandemic. Along the way, we’ve all been tasked with learning myriad new communication platforms, new […]
When the doors open on a London Underground train, a computerized voice reminds you to “Mind the gap.” This polite British reminder is actually telling you, “Watch out! Danger!” as you cross the gap between train and platform. There’s a less obvious but important danger in the gap between how we use the words “training” […]
Virtual Learning – The Training Cure for Covid-19 If there is one thing the coronavirus has taught us all, it is that training, as we know it, is neither resilient nor flexible. Classroom training that requires facilitators and participants to fly to various locations and pack shoulder-to-shoulder in a classroom is no longer an option. […]
Virtual Learning – How to Transform Your Training for Maximum Effectiveness In my first article, I discussed how the coronavirus crisis is forcing organizations to rethink their approaches to training. In particular, moving to a virtual training model. But you can’t simply convert existing classrooms into virtual instructor-led training (vILT). Instead, organizations need to transform […]
Dr. Jim Guilkey discusses virtual learning […]
In a previous article, I discussed how the coronavirus crisis is forcing organizations to rethink their approaches to training. In particular, moving to a virtual learning model. But you can’t simply convert existing classrooms into virtual instructor-led training (vILT). Instead, organizations need to transform their programs. Transformation means not only duplicating but improving the learning […]
Think of a time when you came home from work feeling proud and accomplished. I’d be willing to wager that most of those feelings came because you’d solved a problem that day. From the frontline to the C-Suite, the great majority of the work that actually pushes a company forward is rooted in problem-solving. Solving […]
Much of today’s traditional classroom training is focused on boring lectures and PowerPoint presentations containing as much text as the slide will permit. “Mastery” of materials is tested by multiple-choice questions that only support the ability to memorize. Think about the likely results of such training this way: Can you imagine getting on an airliner […]
