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Progress-U's Learning Approach
If you underwent some traditional trainings for better leadership or sales, ask yourself the question: How much did you really change as a result? How much of what was taught, did you really put into reality?
Numerous discussions with HR specialists confirm our own experience: traditional approaches towards soft skills development - leadership and sales competence are to a very large extent soft skills - don't work very well.
In the best cases, 20-30% of what was taught is actually retained and applied by participants of such trainings, in the worst cases nothing at all.
Our research brought about a considerably more effective approach towards soft skills development. We noticed that in order to achieve a high return on any development measures, it is useful to address three areas:
- Teaching method in the actual course
- Pre-course preparations
- Post-course activities
1. Teaching Method
While the traditional training approach delivers reasonably good results in hard skills development, we found it not to be effective for leadership or sales training. Instead, using the group coaching approach proves to be much more successful for developing soft skills, because it
- Engages the trainees to be very participative
- Develops the trainees from 'where they are'
- Provides ownership over the trainees' learning
Group coaching requires higher skills than traditional training because the 'trainer' can't follow a standard recipe but needs to adjust the content and pace according to the participants' learning progress. This requires the ability to manage different levels of competence among the participants and help everyone to achieve the learning targets.
2. Pre-Course Preparations
While the possibility to arrange for pre-course preparations is somewhat limited for public training programs, they can be undertaken quite intensely for in-house courses and lead to a tailor-made program for the client.
Progress-U's pre-course preparations typically include but must not be limited to
- Environment assessment through various interviews with relevant individuals of the organization
- Individual assessment - in most cases we use Harrison Assessments for this purpose
- Pre-course questionnaire to raise the self-awareness of the participants and to provide valuable info to the trainer to achieve a higher relevance of the course
3. Post-course activities
In order to strengthen the learning from the training course and to help dealing with issues that appear during the implementation of new behaviors, we highly recommend to plan for post-course activities such as
- Group coaching sessions (60-120min each) with all participants
- Individual coaching sessions, if possible, shadow coaching sessions (the coach joins the trainee in his real work situation)
- Reviews with management to discuss further development requirements identified during the coaching sessions
We are aware that these pre- and post-course activities increase the cost of the development program. The question is: Is the price the key factor or the price-performance-ratio? We believe in optimizing the latter.
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