What makes one skills programme outstanding, while another is mediocre? In our experience any programme which can meet eight or more of these criteria has a high chance of bringing about significant and lasting improvements in skilled performance.

The criteria

Assessing an existing or proposed training programme against these criteria will tell you how effective the programme is likely to be and, more importantly, will help you identify the areas where the programme needs to be changed.

Valid success model

Every skills programme is based on a success model. Whether explicit or not, there’s an assumption that certain behaviours are desirable and it’s these behaviours that the learner is encouraged to develop. Any skill or behaviour which a programme suggests being effective is, in these terms, a success model.

But where does a programme’s skill model come from? What’s the evidence that it works? Many models are based on assumptions, not on data. However good your training design, it’s wasted if you’re teaching the wrong things.

So, the first issue for any set of design criteria is conducting a training evaluation.

Emphasis on basic behaviour/skills

Almost every outstandingly successful skills programme concentrates on a thorough development of basic skills, not on what’s called ‘second order skills’ - those skills which you can only learn after the basics have been mastered. Most programmes mix the two. They fail to separate quantity of behaviour (which is a first order skill) from quality of behaviour (which is a second order skill). So, a less successful programme will try to develop quantity and quality of behaviour simultaneously. For example, you will often find role-plays, exercises and skills practices in sales training which set out to ‘improve probing skills’ by encouraging learners to ask more and better questions.

In contrast the outstandingly successful programmes develop quantity first. They would in this example, begin with an exercise to increase the number of questions asked. Only after learners showed themselves able to ask questions in sufficient quantity would exercises be introduced which shape the quality with which the questions are asked.

This is not just true of interpersonal skills. For a long while the principle has been successfully applied to other areas of skilled performance. In sports, for instance, developing the basic movements by repeated practice (quantity) and then shaping and refining them (quality) has proved the fastest and most efficient means of training.

Low threat learning environment

The learning of behavioural skills puts performance pressure on people which can often interfere with skill acquisition. Participants become nervous and afraid to risk that essential prerequisite of all skill learning - the willingness to try something new. As a result, it’s not uncommon for the first one or two days of a programme to be wasted while participants gain sufficient comfort to experiment.

Good programmes build a low threat learning environment which, right from the start, makes people comfortable and confident enough to try new and unfamiliar skills. Reducing the feeling of threat and providing a sense of reward from active engagement and experimentation provides the most fertile learning environment and one supported by recent advances in neuroscience.

Those who are excited about their learning journey and have had access to resources and information about the required skills and behaviours, more quickly gain the confidence to practice. They are also more equipped to respond positively to feedback.

Appropriate use of technology

It is essential to continue to innovate in the use of courses and resources for both knowledge acquisition and to promote communication between learner and expert and between learners.

We should utilise technology because it:

• enables learner interactions which would be impossible without the technology

• provides opportunities for additional learning activities

• builds informed excitement for the programme and the learning journey

• supports reinforcement and embedding

• builds an ongoing relationship between trainers and learners.

Technology cannot currently replicate all the elements of a successful skills based learning journey. The ability to observe performance, provide feedback and encourage behavioural change relies on the personal exchange between highly skilled trainers and participants. Used well, technology enables more of these irreplaceable exchanges to take place.

Building skills incrementally

The most common fault of the average skills programme is that it tries to do too many things. Most programmes would be twice as effective if they contained half as much. It’s not just the overall quantity of material, it’s how that material is introduced to the learner. Usually material comes in chunks which are too large for easy practice and not built into a careful learning sequence. This learning sequence can be characterised as follows:

• Attitudes and beliefs – what needs to change, why and why now?

• Knowledge – including the evidence that our models are successful and what good looks like

• Skills – carefully built so that individuals are not required to run before they can walk

• Behaviours – embedded in realistic situations with high quality feedback focused on changing one thing at a time.

It’s characteristic of first-class programmes that they avoid overload by teaching fewer skills in greater depth; building each skill step-by-step.

Learner centred approach

This is a hard criterion to define, yet it’s an important one. The good programme puts the learner right in the centre of the design. It involves the learner in decisions about activities, pace and priorities. It encourages a very high level of learner participation.

A learner centred approach also matches the modes of delivery (online, face-to-face, work-based tasks, feedback and coaching) with the required learning and learner outcomes. By harnessing the most effective mode of delivery for the required outcome, we build an efficient learning experience which optimises recall and promotes long lasting skill acquisition and behavioural change.

Frequent and objective programme checks

Ask anybody who has been through a skills programme to pick out what it was that made one of those programmes much better than the others. One of the most frequently mentioned characteristics is that the outstanding programme gave a feeling of progress, of movement forward, of knowing where you were - and where you were going.

This should not mean testing and monitoring for their own sake. Where progress checks and feedback are included they should have a specific function in the individual’s learning journey – enabling them to build the required behaviours on a solid foundation of knowledge, attitudes and skills. Where tests are not linked directly to performance improvement, there is a tendency to accord importance to those things which can be easily measured rather than to measure the things which really matter.

How, in design terms, is this feeling of progress achieved? Most often, by using a variety of feedback mechanisms which provide frequent and objective information to the learner to show how the skills are being acquired. Without these, a programme can easily lose focus and momentum. Yet few designs provide sufficient progress checks.

Maximum practice opportunity

Skills are acquired through practice. But practice alone doesn’t develop a skill. You need a special type of practice, practice combined with objective feedback, to improve performance. A limiting factor on the learning which a skills programme can achieve is the number of hours of such individual, guided skills practice which the design allows. Very few skills designs have more than 5% of total programme time available for each person to practise and receive feedback.

Most of the outstanding designs we reviewed contained at least 10% of programme time where an individual could practise and receive feedback. If this sounds low remember that in a traditional design the limiting factor is the availability of a skilled instructor to provide the feedback.

Programme design should not only provide opportunities for objective pointers for future improved performance, it should also provide a clear route for further practice to embed those improvements and build confidence through ‘doing the right things right’. This requires time and therefore the programme design should review all inputs to ensure that only essential components are included prior to practice opportunities. One of the most promising developments in skill training design during the last five years has been new methods for increasing practice and feedback without increasing the number of instructor hours needed to run the programme.

Specific performance models and examples

People don’t learn from principles. If they did, then skills training would be very easy - just explain the principles and let people practise. People tend to learn from specifics; from models, examples and illustrations.

We found that a common characteristic of good skills design was the frequent use of specifics in the form of positive behaviour models, cases and examples.

Exciting to teach and to learn

An effective design has elements of theatre and storytelling (rather than instruction). It has a plot which gradually unfolds, it has shape and continuity. And it usually has some elements of surprise. Unless it’s fun to teach, then the instructor will become bored and the quality of instruction will suffer. If it’s exciting to learn then student motivation will be high and learning will increase. The successful designs which we analysed were exciting learning experiences.

The use of visuals and imagery which is thought provoking and supports rapid understanding of concepts and ideas reflects best practice in the design of the overall learning experience and increases engagement, excitement and learner involvement.

Work-based reinforcement

Without work-based reinforcement even the best programme has limited success in carrying over new behaviours and skills to the job. Common factors in most of the successful design include:

• a requirement for immediate implementation of the skills and behaviours

• a range of different follow-up mechanisms which encourage future practice

• monitoring of work-based activity

• high quality feedback which seeks to continue the learning process as a business as usual activity.

Wherever possible the embedding of behavioural change and continuous improvement should be enabled by the overall programme design. This means being specific about how a learner can continue to practise and gain feedback; how they can take control of their own continuous improvement and, where coaching is unavailable or of low quality, which tools and mechanisms are available for learners to take charge of their own continued development.

Ensuring reinforcement on-the-job is the most difficult of all design challenges. Very few programmes have a well-designed reinforcement system. Those programmes which enable learning through work as well as learning for work, are powerful learning vehicles, often more associated with productivity improvement than training.