Accelerated Learning: Can it Benefit Your Employees?
By Edward E. Gordon

Almost from the first day I began training, working adults have contacted me looking for personal accelerated learning programs. By far the greatest number call because they lack essential job skills. These range from basic literacy skills to advanced personal communication skills for executives.

Often, these adults are seeking a private trainer for confidentiality reasons. They want no one - their co-workers, their manager, their employer, even their own spouse - to know about their education gaps. Others are less concerned with privacy than with speed; they want to master a requisite skill quickly. For both groups, accelerated learning programs are an effective solution.

Accelerated learning comes in all shapes and sizes. When businesses request "accelerated learning," they usually are looking for one-on-one training, coaching, small group instruction, or other personal training or personal professional development alternatives.

One-to-one tutoring offers the greatest advantages of both shortening training time and rapidly accelerating personal learning to be used back on the job. A typical tutoring module consists of 20 one-hour classes, scheduled twice weekly over a 10-week period. Research on learning and retention reveals that one hour of tutoring is equivalent to five hours of classroom teaching. Furthermore, short-term/long-term analysis of results indicates that 80 percent of the information is retained by the adults six months after they finished their tutoring. This exceeds standard classroom training standards.

In workplace applications where the number of employees to be trained is large, group tutorial accelerated learning programs can be structured to accommodate up to five employees in a class. These small-group tutorials typically consist of 20 two-hour classes held over a 10-week period. Group tutorials can be adapted to a wide variety of training situations, as the following examples show.

PricewaterhouseCoopers
Accounting firms have lost clients to competitors due to unintelligible or boilerplate reports. Accountants must now be able to produce financial reports that are individually written, clear, concise, and punctuated with careful recommendations for improving corporate financial management.

PricewaterhouseCoopers offered their CPAs an accelerated writing communications program. Individual CPAs were trained by a writing specialist with a background in financial reports. The one-to-one tutorials were conducted on-site, with two 60-minute classes held each week for 10 weeks. The key element in business writing training is for the executive to practice, not listen to a lecture on "good writing habits."

Indramat
Indramat is an automotive engineering and manufacturing company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, with U.S. operations. To aid their job performance, the American engineers needed accelerated German-language training focused on three types of communication with their Frankfurt colleagues: written correspondence, telephone conversations, and face-to-face negotiations. The training was given through small tutorial groups of five engineers led by a German-language trainer. Grammar, vocabulary and usage were specifically linked to content areas of automotive engineering and manufacturing. Twenty class modules were used, built one upon another, until the individual engineers reached the proficiency level required by their job assignment. This accelerated learning program was conducted over a two-year period and reached more than 40 engineers.

Clorox
The suburban Chicago plant of Clorox employs approximately 100 hourly workers and managers. Plant managers needed accelerated learning programs to upgrade workers' skills for the future introduction of high-tech manufacturing/assembly equipment.

The accelerated learning program consisted of two classes with five workers each. Initial testing showed that individual educational skills in reading and math ranged between the fourth-grade to pre-reading levels. Some of these adults had significant learning disabilities that had prevented success in school. We found, almost without exception, that once their learning disabilities were diagnosed, they were capable of rapid skill growth and information retention. Overall, worker achievement averaged 12 months of skill growth over the 10-week training period.

One employee related how happy he was to be able to read the daily newspaper. For over 15 years, he had come to work every day with a rolled-up newspaper in his back pocket. He wanted to be like everyone else so at breaks and lunch he would "read" his newspaper, even though he understood very few words. Now that he can actually read his newspaper, his self-confidence and personal motivation for learning are at an all-time high.

Other accelerated learning programs for office practice have covered an array of business skills, including grammar, spelling, punctuation, proper business letter forms, writing, speed typing, shorthand, PC use, and PC software. Executive secretary business communication training helped employees learn how to edit the writing errors of top-level managers. The secretaries became proficient in such areas as correct use of pronouns and modifiers, punctuation, parts of speech, and sentence structure.

Accelerated learning lessons From these and other case studies that can be found in Skill Wars, Winning the Battle for Productivity and Profit, we can see how accelerated learning has been deployed in many organizations. Accelerated learning for adults can better integrate new knowledge, thereby speeding up the personal learning process. Such programs can better an adult's sense of satisfaction, increase self-confidence, and tailor learning to practical job issues. The payoff for the employer is increased productivity that far exceeds the costs of the accelerated learning program.

What about computer-based training and distance learning? If computer programs are carefully designed or chosen for specific learning issues, they can work well. However, a personal relationship cannot be established with a machine, no matter how "interactive" the computer-learning course is. "Blended learning" can help by combining computer and classroom instruction. For optimal accelerated learning, tutors seem to help students more by reducing the fear of personal failure and offering more precise individual training, thereby rapidly improving personal learning and raising the organization's productivity and profit.

Edward Gordon is president of the Chicago-based Imperial Consulting Corporation. He is the author of Skill Wars, Winning the Battle for Productivity and Profit and Tutor Quest: Finding Effective Education for Children and Adults He can be reached for questions or comments at imperialcorp@juno.com.

Reprinted from Employee Benefit News