In my last post I offered an approach to programming learning initiatives that dealt with the Employability skills list in a particular way i.e. using experiential activity content to sensitise participants to the need for them to acquire Role Related Technical Skills. The sequence in that example was soft skills first then a follow-up of harder skills, a process that will hopefully avoid any demotivating sense of the content being purely for the benefit of the employer. In this post I'm going to offer an alternative approach that addresses the same potential objections to participants buying into the initiative.
Within RSVP we refer to this second approach as Reinforcement - introducing the Role Related Technical Skills first then offering a safe space for participants to experiment with using these skills in an engaging practical activity. The thinking behind this approach is that the experiential element is sufficiently enjoyable that participants lose their scepticism about the content being largely for the benefit of employers rather than them. In practice you're asking the participants to suspend their negativity about the work-specific learning content until they've experienced how it can make their jobs easier or more fulfilling.
If you're doubtful that your target population will give you this goodwill and space it may well be that you make this a three stage initiative by prefacing the harder content with a relevant icebreaker. (The emphasis here is on the word 'relevant' - if you've been reading these posts for long you'll no-doubt know that I'm a firm believer that an icebreaker isn't just a bit of fun, it should be carefully selected as being appropriate to the overall learning objectives of the initiative). Here the sequence becomes;
- Relevant Icebreaker to introduce the learning content and engage the participants.
- Role Related Technical Skills development content.
- Experiential activity that offers an unambiguous practice field for participants to specifically experiment with these new skills.
- Review of the Experiential activity that builds learning transfer back into the workplace.
- Action-plan this transfer of learning.
You'll see that this reverses the 'Sensitisation' approach in that it introduces hard skill development first, then offers the opportunity to put these skills into practice to explore their benefits.
In the next and final post in this sequence I'll go back to the Employability skills list and look at the way experiential activity is by far the best way to develop these skills.
