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The trainers and Bell Atlantic found
a way to make employees productive in half the time of traditional
training methods. In the bargain, they created a learning
atmosphere that was fun, efficient, and beneficial to everyone
involved.
By Dave Meier and Mary Jane Gill
The basic challenge for many corporate
training departments is to produce well-trained, productive
employees and reduce the amount of time it takes to train
them. The trainers at Bell Atlantic's C&P Telephone
Company, which serves Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia,
and Washington DC, found an answer to that challenge in
the principles and techniques of accelerated learning. In
the bargain, they created a learning atmosphere that was
fun, efficient, and beneficial to everyone involved.
After testing the water with a pilot
program, the company allowed the training department to
convert two of its customer-service-representative Training
courses - courses that produce the company's bread and butter
- to the accelerated learning format. As a result, the costs
of one course were reduced by 42 percent and the other by
57 percent. In addition, the satisfaction of students and
trainers greatly improved, as did their job performance.
Those facts were reflected in the supervisors' overwhelmingly
positive evaluations of the new graduates (Figures 1 and
2).
This article provides a brief report
of what Bell Atlantic did and what results it achieved.
Basic principles and guidelines
The purpose of accelerated learning is
to provide effective training in a short time. The methods
are interactive and treat learning as a collaborative effort
of equals, rather than a hierarchical relationship between
teacher and pupil. The principles for the learning environment
are that it:
Be positive and accepting
Provide and natural, comfortable, and colorful setting
Exalt rather than trivialize the trainees
Help people eliminate or reduce any fears, stresses, or
learning barriers
Be supportive of both trainer and trainee
Provide a multidimensional approach to learning
Accommodate different learning styles, speeds, and needs
(rather than force people, assembly-line fashion, through
a uniform process at a uniform speed)
Make learning fun rather than serious and overbearing
Provide for group-based learning
Present material pictorially as well as verbally
The first steps
From the outset, accelerated learning
methods seemed intuitively sound, but the company wanted
to make sure that the methods would work effectively when
applied to critical customer-service-representative training
course, and that the costly conversions of those courses
would be worth the money.
The company started out by providing
the training manager with a week of training in accelerated
learning. A few key trainers in the organization also received
training, and short in-house seminars gave the other company
trainers a foundation in accelerated learning concepts and
techniques.
The company had the training department
test the techniques on a 12-day technical course, a course
that was historically unsuccessful and that most people
found complex, confusing, and tedious. The course was redone
completely in an accelerated learning format and delivered
to new trainees. The results were overwhelming: training
time was cut by more than half, trainers and trainees were
happier, and trainers found that trainees learned more than
from the 12-day course. That was all the proof the company
needed, and they were ready to work on some of the company's
larger, longer, and more costly courses.
Taking on the big courses
They selected two customer-service-representative
training courses for conversion to the accelerated learning
format: a six-week one in private-residence order taking
and a four-week one in private-residence billing. The courses
were long and costly, but absolutely essential to the company's
business. A large number of employees relied on them for
initial training.
The training department decided from
the start that it would not simply fine-tune the courses
with a few accelerated learning techniques, but that it
would completely rewrite them. It brought together a team
of course developers, some of whom, in fact, had no experience
in course development - the department wanted people who
were free of prior habits and biases and who could bring
fresh perspectives to the project. The project manager,
however, had been trained in accelerated learning course
development and had a background in behavioral science and
organizational development.
The development team worked in a think-tank
environment it called the Skunk Works - an office far removed
from the team members' normal workplace. Life in the Skunk
Works was designed to be informal, playful, and creative,
with an energetic environment that would stimulate everyone's
imagination. The room was colorful and had fresh flowers,
relaxing music in the background, and plenty of snacks.
Wherever possible, accelerated techniques were used to drive
the development process.
As the team members thought about and
planned the courses, they wrote their thoughts in words
and pictures on large sheets of paper. They created huge
information graphs (ìmindmapsî) to help them capture, visualize,
and interrelate ideas. And they used mental imagery quite
effectively. They would sit quietly and imagine the perfect
customer-service training course in action (a technique
known as ìend-result imageryî). Then they shared their imagery
experiences, elaborating on the ideas and building a curriculum.
The development-team members finished
their initial work by creating a facilitator guidebook and
a student workbook. Then they were ready for the delivery.
The classroom experience
The development team gave the course
instructors (called learning advisors) three basic guidelines:
1. Keep the threat low.
2. Keep the energy high.
3. Trust the learner and the learning
process.
To create a trusting environment, the
learning advisors revamped the classrooms: they put pictures
on the walls and colorful objects around the room, arranged
tables in small clusters, played soft music, and put flowers
on the tables. They wanted to give the rooms a natural look
and to make them learner-centered, even playful - places
where people could relax, be themselves, and enjoy learning.
From the start, the learning advisors
expected the trainees to be proactive rather than passive,
to take charge of their own learning, and, certainly, to
master the learning material of the course. To achieve that,
they made trainees responsible for correcting any aspects
of the physical environment, the materials, or teaching/learning
methods that were getting in the way of their learning.
Before the end of each day, the class created a wall chart
on two topics: what went well that day, and what could have
gone better. Where possible, the learning advisors immediately
implemented the ideas and suggestions. In that way the trainees
became part of the development staff for the ongoing evolution
and improvement of the course.
Learning accelerators
Collaboration rather than competition
is important for accelerated learning. Trainees were encouraged
to help each other in any way they could. At various times
throughout the course, they formed ad hoc learning groups
or reinforced each other's training in pairs. They were
responsible not just for their own learning, but for the
learning of everyone in the class as well - everyone was
a student and a teacher simultaneously.
One important collaborative learning
technique is learner articulation. To his or her partner,
the learner describes, out loud and in detail, the material
he or she just learned. This articulation of newly learned
facts, ideas, and procedures (with demonstrations where
possible) helps speed the learning and make it stick.
Many other kinds of learning accelerators
were built into the course - some subtle, but most quite
obvious. Here's a partial list:
Positive suggestions
Time for preparing the learner to learn
Metaphor and mnemonic devices
Relaxation exercises
Mental imagery exercises
Learning labs (multipathed, self-paced environments)
Role plays, games, songs, and team projects
Information graphs (mindmaps)
Of course, different accelerators work
better for different people. The environment has a lot of
diversity, and people can pick from a smorgasbord of options
and choose learning methods and materials that work best
for them.
Evaluations
Training courses that employ the techniques
of accelerated learning are now a standard part of Bell
Atlantic's training program. Trainees, learning advisors,
and supervisors all positively evaluate the results of the
new courses.
Trainees give the course excellent evaluations
in most cases and often remark how stress-free and enjoyable
the learning is. Most find that the learning was easy and
fun, and many report a high level of job confidence as a
result of the class. The drop-out rate from the course has
declined from 20 percent to 5.5 percent; in addition, it
seems that people are less likely to drop from the accelerated
learning course because of learning difficulties.
The learning advisors like the new courses
also. At the start they worried about their loss of control
in an environment that stressed learner independence and
mutual collaboration. But once they were involved in it,
they found that their teaching was easier and more effective
than before. And, they say, because they allow themselves
to step out of the role of dogmatic instructor, they (like
the trainees) go home at night relaxed and energized.
Supervisors give the graduates of the
accelerated classes higher grades for job performance, as
shown in Figures 1 and 2. Compared to graduates of standard
courses, the new graduates, they say, have greater confidence,
problem-solving ability, and team spirit. They can work
better without supervision, provide customers with more
accurate information, and produce better sales results.
They also work more speedily with reference materials.
For Bell Atlantic, the payoffs of converting
to an accelerated format have been significant. Compared
to the results from previous courses:
Employees are productive sooner
Job performance is higher
Training time has been virtually cut in half
The new courses are easier to update
The learning process is less tedious
and more humanly enjoyable for students and instructors,
improving the work atmosphere.
Bell Atlantic has discovered that accelerated
learning technology is a powerful all in meeting today's
challenges to do more with less. In an era of limited resources
and increasing need, accelerated learning has proven to
be an instructional technology whose time has come.
This article originally appeared in the
Training & Development Journal, January 1989
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