Lean manufacturing is at root about increasing the value an organization provides to its customers and decreasing waste. Lean organizations do this by creating a process of continuous improvement that places an emphasis on organizational learning.
We’ll explain more in this article on these foundational concepts of lean manufacturing.
In this discussion, we take a deep-dive into learning objectives with learning researcher and instructional designer Dr. Patti Shank.
In particular, we explain what a learning objective is; why you should create learning objectives; how to create learning objectives; how learning objectives should be mapped to learning assessments and learning activities; and a few other juicy topics as well.
This is the first of two related discussions with Dr. Shank. Be sure to check out our discussion regarding Learning Assessments as well, and the concepts of learning objectives and learning assessments are very closely related to one another. We’ve also had a previous discussion with Patti titled Deliberate Practice, Deep Learning, and Desirable Difficulties you may find helpful.
Thanks to Patti for sharing her time and knowledge and for all the great learning research she does!
Here are some additional, related articles you may be interested in:
Finally, feel free to download our free guide to learning objectives below, which very closely matches Dr. Shank’s recommendations in this interview.
Get this free guide to learn all you need to know to write learning objectives, create better training, and help improve workplace performance.
If you’re involved in facilities maintenance, you know that training your maintenance staff isn’t that easy. And that’s before you even begin to think of the principles of sound instructional design and the technologies involved if you want to add an online training component.
In this guide, we tell you everything you need to know to get your facilities maintenance training program creating effective, measurable learning outcomes, helping to onboard new hires, speed up the transition of employees to competence and expert level, fill skill gaps, and more.
The guide below covers:
Enjoy the guide and let us know if we can help you with your facilities maintenance training program, and check out the quick highlight video of our 3D-animated online facilities maintenance training courses below.
Our friends at the ASSP and ASSP Podcast Channel asked us over to discuss some things related to safety training, OSHA compliance, and the current COVID-19 epidemic.
You can listen to the podcast episode here.
The discussion is based in part on our recent OSHA, Safety Training & COVID-19 article.
The very day of the discussion, OSHA released a new guidance that dealt with safety training and OSHA enforcement discretion. We didn’t know about the new OSHA guidance when we were recording the podcast episode, but we passed along relevant links to the ASSP afterwards and they’ve posted them at their site. Plus, we’ve included that new information in our article on OSHA & Safety Training linked above.
Let us know if you’ve got any questions, and be safe, friends!
Download this free guide to assist with meeting your organization’s OSHA general industry compliance requirements.
Training the employees in a top-notch maintenance department is a daunting effort.
In this guide, we tell you what you need to know about maintenance training programs in general as well as using online training courses and tools for part of your training.
The guide covers the following aspects of designing, developing, and implementing your maintenance training program:
Enjoy the free guide to maintenance tech training programs and let us know if we can help you out!
Quick Note: Don’t forget to catch our LIVE ONLINE WEBINAR TITLED “WHY APPLY HPI?,” WHERE WE’LL GO OVER A LOT OF THIS MATERIAL AND MORE, WITH PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT SPECIALIST JOE ESTEY. REGISTER TODAY…THE WEBINAR IS THURSDAY, JULY 16.
In this interview, we talked with Human Performance Improvement Specialist Joe Estey to learn what Human Performance Improvement, or HPI, is.
We’ve interviewed Joe before and we’ve included links to other discussions we’ve had with Joe below. In addition, because Human Performance Improvement, to paraphrase Joe from this interview, “has more similarities than differences” to fields known as Safety Differently, Safety II, Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), New Safety, and Resilience Engineering, we’ve included some links related to those below as well.
Enjoy the interview and thanks to Joe for sharing his time, knowledge, experience, and insights.
Since you’re interested in HPI, you might find our article on Robert Mager’s Performance Analysis Method and his Performance Analysis Flow-Chart and our The ATD Human Performance Improvement (HPI) Model article helpful, too.
Two quick notes: Since we originally wrote this article, Vector Solutions (the parent company of Convergence Training) created free online COVID-19 training courses for people to watch. You can view them here. Also, since we published this article, OSHA has released an update on Safety Training Requirements for COVID-19…please check that link you just passed for our explanation on OSHA’s requirements.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created many changes in society and at work. For those companies that are still operating, and for those employees who are still working, safety training and in particular mandatory, compliance-based safety training, is a serious consideration.
What’s the best way to complete mandatory safety training, and stay in compliance with OSHA requirements, during this pandemic? In particular, how to do this and still maintain the social distancing requirements of six feet personal separation? And, given the novel status of the COVID-19 virus, the fact that we’re still learning about COVID-19 and transmission routes, and increasing concern and evidence that the virus may be aerosolized and people could possibly be infected by an infected (but asymptomatic) person who is simply talking or breathing, is six feet of separation enough? Is face-to-face safety training a good idea or is it, perhaps, in some way counter to the goal of safety and health during a pandemic?
Can online safety training be used to avoid face-to-face compliance-based safety training or minimize it during the pandemic?
We’ll try to cover these issues in this article, explain what we know about OSHA’s current safety training requirements, and give you some tips for integrating online safety training into your safety training program while still staying in compliance with OSHA regulations in this article.
We wish you all good health and safety during a difficult time. Please feel free to use the comments section to share any tips or information you may have on these topics.
We encourage you to read teh article below, but you might want to know that our own Jeffrey Dalto, a member of the ASSP Z490 committee and a contributor to the ANSI/ASSP Z49.2 national standard for online EHS training, recently talked about OSHA Safety Training Compliance and COVID-19 for the ASSP podcast channel.
On April 16, 2020, OSHA released yet another new guidance related to COVID-19. This one is titled Discretion in Enforcement when Considering an Employer’s Good Faith Efforts During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic.
We’re going to encourage you to read the entire guidance, but the excerpt below shows OSHA is giving their field officers discretion on enforcement of violations during an inspection if the employer shows evidence of “good faith efforts to comply.”
During the course of an inspection, OSHA Area Offices will assess an employer’s efforts to comply with standards that require annual or recurring audits, reviews, training, or assessments (see Annex below for some examples). Compliance Safety and Health Officers (CSHOs) should evaluate whether the employer made good faith efforts to comply with applicable OSHA standards and, in situations where compliance was not possible, to ensure that employees were not exposed to hazards from tasks, processes, or equipment for which they were not prepared or trained. As part of assessing whether an employer engaged in good faith compliance efforts, CSHOs should evaluate whether the employer thoroughly explored all options to comply with the applicable standard(s) (e.g., the use of virtual training or remote communication strategies). CSHOs should also consider any interim alternative protections implemented or provided to protect employees, such as engineering or administrative controls, and whether the employer took steps to reschedule the required annual activity as soon as possible.
The OSHA Safety and Health Topic Page for COVID-19 has become a daily must-read to keep on top of all the new stuff from OSHA re: COVID-19. You might want to bookmark it. Stay safe and healthy, friends!
Download this free guide to assist with meeting your organization’s OSHA general industry compliance requirements.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, things seem to be changing super-quickly. That’s true in all walks of life, and it’s true if you’re trying to keep up with OSHA’s responses as well.
We’re actually a few days behind in noticing that OSHA released a new guidance related to COVID-19 on Wednesday, April 13, 2020 titled Interim Enforcement Response Plan for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).
It’s a longish one, so we’re going to leave you to read it instead of trying to summarize it, although we did touch on some part of it in our newly updated article OSHA, Safety Training & COVID-19.
Stay safe and healthy, friends!
Companies have been using online training more and more in recent years. But this COVID-19 pandemic, which really became an issue in the United States in early 2020, is making all sorts of companies think even more about using different forms of online training to help transfer knowledge to their employees while assisting employees in the continued development of skills.
Just like any other department, maintenance departments are thinking the same thing, thinking of safe ways to deliver training to maintenance techs while observing social distancing and trying to prevent passing a dangerous viral infection from worker to worker.
In this article, we’ll discuss a few different types of online training in this article and give you some tips for getting some online training to your maintenance techs instead of using instructor-led training.
One powerful idea in the lean manufacturing toolkit is poka-yoke, which can be translated into English as something like “mistake-proofing.”
By designing equipment and work processes to make certain kinds of error impossible, we can reduce error, reduce waste, and improve quality and value.
Although poka-yoke is an important part of lean manufacturing, you can see that it’s important outside of a lean context too. For example, safety professionals often speak of prevention through design, which is clearly a similar idea. So poke-yoka can help you improve efficiency, quality, safety, profitability and even worker morale while increasing value for the customer.
Read the rest of the article to learn more about poka-yoke, an important tool for continuous improvement.
In this discussion with Human Performance Improvement Specialist Joe Estey, we talk about risk at work and risk management in general, about the difference between being a risk-adverse organization and a risk-competent organization in particular, and Joe shares some tips for helping workers to become risk-competent.
Additionally, Joe offers some great resources to learn more, and we’ll provide links to those resources below.
Enjoy the interview in recorded discussion format below and good luck with your own efforts to create a risk-competent workforce that will assist your organizational continuous improvement efforts.
In addition to the discussion about risk-competency below, you might enjoy these earlier discussions we’ve had with Joe as well:
Enjoy the video immediately below. In a little while, we’ll offer a transcript of this discussion as well.
