Companies have been dealing with a skill gap for many years–this is well known. And the COVID-19 pandemic only increased that skill gap. That’s because some old jobs were lost, at least temporarily, other new jobs were created, and people where changing their jobs either within the same organization or from one organization to another. And a host of digital and online skills became even more important than they were before COVID.

So that skill gap problem we’ve been talking about for a long time became even more pressing.

In this article, we thought we’d take a look at the skills gap problem, including how to address it, from the perspective of human performance improvement, or HPI. HPI is a performance-improvement methodology that includes but is not limited to training for potential solutions.

We hope you find the article helpful. Please share your own experiences and tips at the bottom in the comments section.

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A lot of companies are rightly concerned about acquiring a more diverse workforce. I’d say that’s just the right thing to do from a societal perspective, but beyond that there’s a lot of research showing that diverse organizations are more innovative and generally perform better.

And likewise, a lot of organizations are working to create a more welcome, accepting, and inclusive environment for their workers. Makes sense, right? And that includes spending a lot of time creating, delivering, and consuming (as learners) well-intended diversity training activities and programs. Also makes sense, right?

The problem is that studies show a lot of this training is ineffective. Which isn’t so good.

But the Learning Guild, and Dr. Jane Bozarth, have come to the rescue with a meaty, 33-page, research-based report titled What Works–and What Doesn’t–in Diversity Training (download a copy for yourself here).

If you’re not familiar with the Learning Guild, their Research Library, or learning researcher Jane Bozarth, put them all on your list of things to learn more about, right there alongside “how to make my diversity training more effective.”

We encourage you to read the entire report, and we’ll summarize a few of the key findings for you below.

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You don’t need us to tell you that when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, work changed for a lot of us. And workplace training changed a lot because of COVID-19, too.

We’ve been writing about this recurrently over time as the COVID pandemic stretches on. We started with articles on quickly developing elearning courses and quickly creating live online learning, and then we summarized much of that with a webinar on getting training online quickly. After that, we discussed “live online learning,” including webinars and virtual classrooms, with expert Shannon Tipton. More recently we’ve been including some of the tips we’ve learned in our webinars on using online manufacturing training & online maintenance training (and we’ll be doing that again in a December webinar on online safety training).

In addition, we also talked with Dr. Stella Lee about how COVID-19 presented both a need and an opportunity for L&D to “up their game” to help people upskill and reskill for the pandemic economy, and recently we profiled 3 online learning tools and skills made more essential by COVID-19.

We’ve also been doing everything we can to learn more and sharpen our own skills, in particular skills for designing, developing & leading virtual classrooms. In doing so, we’ve identified Cindy Huggett as a leading expert in the field and have read two of her books, both of which we recommend to you: Virtual Training Basics and Virtual Training Tools and Templates. And we’ve been learning from the resources, blog articles, and other materials at her website as well.

All of which brings us to the fact that Cindy Huggett has recently conducted surveys and published the results (an her thoughts) in an article titled The State of Virtual Training 2020. We encourage you to check out the entire article (there’s also an infographic she created that you can download), but we’ll summarize some of the key points here.

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Developing helpful mental models is critical for learning and performing effectively at work.

We decided to talk with learning strategist Arun Pradhan to learn more about it and to learn more about his new website, ModelThinkers.com.

The video’s immediately below–enjoy it. And we’ve provided links to some helpful resources below the video as well.

As always, thank to Arun.

Remember we’ve got links to more resources below.

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