This book deals with solving a pressing organizational challenge of bringing employees up to speed faster. In the fast-paced business world, organizations need faster readiness of employees to handle the complex responsibilities of their jobs. The author conducted an extensive doctoral research study with 85 global experts across 66 project cases to explore the practices and strategies that were proven to reduce time to proficiency of employees in a range of organizations worldwide. This book provides the readers with a first-hand account of findings exclusively related to training and learning strategies, instructional methods, and curriculum design. This book delivers over 21 training and learning strategies across online learning, classroom instructions, and on-the-job learning. These strategies will allow training designers and learning specialists to design workplace training programs that hold the potential to shorten time to proficiency of employees. The book not only describes findings of the study and theoretical underpinnings, but it also provides practical guidance for implementation to equip corporate learning specialists, HR professionals, training leaders, performance consultants, and direct managers. Chapter 1 of the book introduces the research study that was conducted and describes the sampling, participants, data collection and data analysis methodology. Chapter 2 introduces the concept and definition of accelerated proficiency and metrics such as time to proficiency and speed to proficiency. The chapter sets the premise for the business need that demands learning designers to explore methods to shorten time to proficiency of employees. Chapter 3 describes the result of proficiency curve analysis that revealed four possible trajectories to accelerate employee proficiency. Chapter 4 introduces the four key hurdles in the form of the inefficiencies of traditional training models that hamper the acceleration of proficiency. This chapter sets the stage what needs to be avoided when designing training meant to accelerate proficiency. Chapter 5 addresses the group of findings related to online or e-learning. A conceptual model is presented to describe five e-learning strategies with the great potential to accelerate proficiency in workplace skills. Chapter 6 focuses on findings grouped as the formal classroom or instructor-led instructional strategies. The chapter specifies five instructional strategies to design classroom training and deliver an enriched learning experience to put learners on an accelerated proficiency path. Chapter 7 explains the findings grouped as on-the-job learning or workplace learning strategies. The chapter describes three strategies for workplace learning design to leverage workplace opportunities and interventions which reported great potential to accelerate proficiency. The chapter presents a conceptual model of workplace learning strategies to guide the implementation of these strategies. Chapter 8 consolidate the strategies for online learning, classroom learning and workplace learning into a simple model for training design that holds the potential to create training that can contribute into shortening time to proficiency of the employees. Chapter 9 concludes the book with final thoughts on the role of training and learning strategies toward accelerating proficiency in the long run.

Time is money and a reduction in time should be the first goal of any training program or any employee development initiative. The skills and knowledge acquired today become irrelevant or obsolete quickly. In that kind of dynamics, the organizations have shifted focus on how to shorten time to proficiency of employees and bring them up to speed to the required performance in a shorter time. This book intends to establish scholarly know-how on this construct of Accelerated Proficiency and provide practitioners and researchers with a condensed and coherent knowledge-base on this burning business concept. The book explores concepts, themes, nature, and challenges associated with the process of accelerating proficiency. This book discusses the business metrics of time to proficiency and speed to proficiency. This book is organized around reviews of studies on performance and proficiency from several different disciplines spanning over five decades. In particular, this book will enable you with the answers to some crucial questions - What is the nature of the proficiency in the organization? What is the meaning and goal of accelerating proficiency? Whether or not proficiency and performance of employees can be accelerated? What kind of methods has been researched and proven to accelerate proficiency?

This book presents a research thesis of a large-scale study conducted with over 50 large organizations in 7 countries with 80 business leaders to understand how businesses speed up the proficiency of their employees to meet business challenges. The book describes a start-to-end research study that explored the concept of 'accelerated proficiency' of employees in organizations. The book is organized into five chapters. The book introduces the concept of accelerated proficiency in a business context in light of reviews of four decades of classic studies. The research methodology to identify sources, recruit participants, and the mechanism to collect as well as analyze data have been explained in detail. The book reveals six business practices implemented by organizations across the board that seem to make a major impact in shortening the time to proficiency of employees. Important observations and findings have been discussed as implications in regards to how organizations orchestrated six business practices as an input-output-feedback system to reduce the time-to-proficiency of the workforce. The book briefly explains how these six practices were implemented through a set of twenty-four strategies in various contexts. The concepts and findings discussed in this book contribute significantly to the body of knowledge on accelerated proficiency. In particular, the conceptual model and the framework developed in this study can be implemented across a range of contexts, business sectors, job types, and settings to reduce the time-to-proficiency of the workforce.

This book presents a research thesis of a large-scale study conducted with over 50 large organizations in 7 countries with 80 business leaders to understand how businesses speed up the proficiency of their employees to meet business challenges. The book describes a start-to-end research study that explored the concept of 'accelerated proficiency' of employees in organizations. The book is organized into five chapters. The book introduces the concept of accelerated proficiency in a business context in light of reviews of four decades of classic studies. The research methodology to identify sources, recruit participants, and the mechanism to collect as well as analyze data have been explained in detail. The book reveals six business practices implemented by organizations across the board that seem to make a major impact in shortening the time to proficiency of employees. Important observations and findings have been discussed as implications in regards to how organizations orchestrated six business practices as an input-output-feedback system to reduce the time-to-proficiency of the workforce. The book briefly explains how these six practices were implemented through a set of twenty-four strategies in various contexts. The concepts and findings discussed in this book contribute significantly to the body of knowledge on accelerated proficiency. In particular, the conceptual model and the framework developed in this study can be implemented across a range of contexts, business sectors, job types, and settings to reduce the time-to-proficiency of the workforce.

This book provides a practical and intuitive model for measuring the effectiveness of technical training programs, addressing the challenges faced by technical training managers and other technical managers in justifying the return on investment for large-scale and investment-intensive training programs. The 4-tier Return on Expectations (ROE) framework presented in this book, developed through years of research, observation, and experience, aims at reducing the pains of technical business managers while presenting and return on investment (ROI) of their training programs. This book reduces your pains by eliminating the need to dollarize every piece of training investment. It also makes you less dependent on practically difficult methods to compute a defendable ROI. Instead, it will guide you on clarifying your and your stakeholders’ expectations and then presenting a return on expectations, using the most relevant metrics and practical approach to calculate four indices: training reaction index, improvement index, effectiveness index, and impact index. ​​​​​​​By using a feedback-based and data-driven approach, this book enables technical training managers or training leaders handling large-scale programs to collect data, measure key indicators, and compute indices that provide evidence of the effectiveness of their training programs, ultimately helping them communicate the value and effectiveness of your training programs to executives. Never again would you return to your traditional methods.

This ground-breaking research report enables you to get unprecedented benefits in your business and in getting a competitive edge as a manager, practitioner or consultant. This research report brings you practical information on S2Pro© Speed to Proficiency Model in a practitioner’s language without academic jargons. The report contains highly relevant and practice-oriented findings, enriched with implementation recommendations for practitioners to reduce time to proficiency of your employees drastically and save dollars. Time-to-proficiency is becoming one of the most important business metrics for fast-paced technological organizations. Most of the organizations in the fast-paced business realize that the faster employees learn the skills required to do the job up to set performance standards, the faster they can handle new customer needs, meet new market needs, perform to new expectations, and deliver new technologies or adopt new changes. The speed of skill obsolescence with the pace of increasing complexity drive great necessity for organizations to figure out the methods and strategies to accelerate time-to-proficiency of their employees. Developed through five years of extensive practice-based doctorate research in Australia, this report provides organizations and practitioners with a credible and detailed framework to implement Speed To Proficiency Model.

In today’s fast-paced world, with a high degree of skill obsolesce, massive technological innovations, and rapid changes, it is important that global leaders develop the performance of their employees to be at par with the speed of businesses. This book aims to make “speed” as the priority to stay ahead in the competition. This book is a one-stop portal for futuristic leaders and managers to learn about the importance of shortening the time to proficiency of their workforce. This book is a distilled wisdom derived from an extensive research on 66 start-to-end project success stories spanning 28 industries, contributed by 85 best-in-class business leaders from 7 countries. This book is the first and the only one until now that has revealed some alarming figures on the time to proficiency metrics, which, you, as a futuristic leader, cannot afford to ignore. You will gain in-depth insights as to why and how the best-in-class global business leaders prioritize and institute time to proficiency metrics in their business dashboards. You will adopt data-based evidence to present compelling business cases to implement those metrics in your organization. In particular, this book will enable you to find the answers to some crucial questions: - How can you go about being a “speed-savvy” visionary leader? - Why should you focus on developing employee proficiency? - Why should the speed of employee development matter to you as a leader? - How are global organizations using the new time to proficiency metrics? - How alarming is the time to proficiency of workforce in your industry? - What drives the best-in-class leaders to prioritize time to proficiency metrics in their dashboards? - What tangible business gains can organizations derive from a shorter time to proficiency?

Up to Speed means reaching a desired level of performance. Every minute employees are less than 100% proficient in their jobs has a direct and significant financial impact. Getting up to speed in weeks, months or years sooner is the focus of this book. This book is the story of applying the Learning Paths Methodology over the past fifteen years to reduce time to proficiency significantly for hundreds of jobs across most major industries. The story starts after the publishing of the book, Learning Paths: Increase Profits by Reducing the Time It Takes to Get Employees Up to speed. The Learning Paths book is still a valuable resource for tools, forms, and great ideas. Up to Speed is based on three key principles about how people really learn. First, learning is a process, not an event. Second, knowing and doing are not the same in fact they are very, very different. Third, training should be by design not by accident. The Learning Path Methodology treats learning as a process and then takes steps to reduce time, waste and variability by applying the best of process improvement, accelerated learning and change management techniques.