The 70:20:10 principle – turning managers into safety training champions

The key to turning line managers and employees into health and safety training champions  

In a previous blog a fundamental point I raised was that to get effective on-the-job implementation of skills then we have to make our health and safety training far more relevant to each job or role.

The logical conclusion is that this then leads to an explosion of courses – or a fragmentation of training. And the question posed was – who on earth is going to author and maintain this huge training library of training?

Well, the answer is – it’s already happening in your organisation!   There already exists a massive library of job specific training courses. It’s an amazing library where the course materials are updated thousands of times every day.   What I am also willing to bet is that this library is largely hidden from view and no one in your organisation has any real idea of it’s overall content.

So where is this library I hear you ask? To reveal it, we need take a look at the 70:20:10 principle that says that vocational learning typically occurs as follows:

70% — on-the-job experience – learning through doing the work

20% — on-the-job mentoring and advice from colleagues

10% — off-the-job structured learning courses

That’s right – what this model predicts is that 90% of what each person in your organisation knows about how to do their job they got from sources other than your training courses!

Is this hard to believe?

NASA

Lets take a look at a real world example to show you what we are talking about.

In the 1990s NASA realised they had an impending catastrophe looming.   A large group of their most experienced engineers were nearing retirement within a short space of time. This was the first generation that had put man on the moon and built the first re-usable space shuttle.   What they also realised was at the time the large majority of its on-the-job knowledge that had been painstakingly developed over decades of trial and error was not recorded anywhere other than in these peoples heads – they noted:

“The problem is IT systems don’t address the critical need for the most experienced people to mentor and train others or to share tacit knowledge from one mission to another” (Jean ne Holm, Chief Knowledge Architect, NASA)

They realised that operational knowledge worth billions of dollars was literally about to walk out of the door and would be lost forever.  So, to solve this problem they developed a web-based ‘Lessons Learned Information System’, or LLIS, designed to enable all employees to easily record and share their operational knowledge. By empowering employees to publish their operational expertise they hoped to significantly enhance peer-to-peer learning.   One of the major challenges they faced was the sheer volume of the content developed. There was so much of it that it was very difficult for individuals to search the data bank and find the lesson applicable to their role. (Leonard & Kiron 2002).

As a result they realised that they needed to develop a more powerful system capable of delivering the right knowledge to the right person at their moment of need. This was one of the first ‘learning content management systems’ or LCMS as opposed to simply an LMS or learning management system. LCMS’s can receive and manage content produced by frontline employers.

And with this development there has been a fundamental change in approach to learning – as demonstrated within NASA – as they explain:

“At NASA, the knowledge that helps us to do our work is everywhere. We take a very distributed approach to knowledge management by helping people get done what they need to in their part of the organisation” (Jeanne Holm, Chief Knowledge Architect, NASA)

What we talking about here is crowdsourcing your training – empowering those who are experts at performing each role to help author and maintain the training content. And, the beauty of this approach is that it devolves responsibility to line managers and key employees getting them involved and owning the training.

One of the challenges is helping them then to incorporate health and safety as they author courses and validating what’s been produced – I’ll look at this in future blogs. 

Do you push or pull?

The web has led to a training revolution – we can now enable employees to easily create and share training content in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

LCMS is not just a new acronym – these systems have enabled a revolution in approach to training strategy from what is known as a ‘push’ to a ‘pull’ model. A push model treats trainees as passive consumers whose training needs can be fully predicted and met by centralised training specialists. By contrast, a pull model (AKA Web 2.0) treats trainees as active participants who help to create the training content and use it to solve the operational challenges they face.

NASA was one of the first examples – but I will explore more in future blog posts.

Traditional push models (AKA Web 1.0) are becoming increasingly unsustainable because of the speed at which operational processes develop and change. Think about it, how can a centralised health and safety training function realistically produce and maintain a library of training courses for every role and context within an organisation?

There are also a number of important knowledge management principles (based on adult learning research – AKA Andragogy Principles) which fundamentally undermines the push model approach – these are:

• Trainees won’t pay much attention to knowledge until the moment in time that they need it
• Trainees value knowledge that they request far more than that which is unsolicited
• The more specific the knowledge is to the trainees’ real-world situation the more it will be valued and the more effective it will be.

So, if you compare traditional push learning, or formal training, with these trainees’ needs you can see why there is so much hostility to health and safety training – there is massive disconnect between our approach and their needs.   For example, how much of what we give them is specific to their operational needs? How often is the training delivered at the moment they need it?   Pull style training, that’s been produced by those close to the job, is far more suited to meeting these principles.

Is this end of formalised training?

No, despite what I have covered above we still need formal training – or if you like, the knowledge-based stuff we do out of the workplace.   This is not an either or option; research shows that both formal and informal learning is required and fits together. Formal learning provides core skills (e.g. the theory) and meets compliance needs (i.e. you have to be able to prove that certain things have been learnt). Informal learning meets ongoing context specific operational needs of getting the job done e.g. the practical (Dale & Bell 2000)

But, it’s a question of balance. Where do we currently focus the vast majority of our learning and development efforts? What resources are spent on formal training developed and delivered by centralised subject experts as opposed to informal workplace-based strategies that help front-line workers record and share with others what they know?

Summary

Informal learning is inevitable – it is happening and will continue to happen whether you recognise it or not.   It’s already there and if it can be facilitated and harnessed it requires very little extra effort to achieve the goal of developing a massive library of job-specific training courses.

And best of all, this approach is proven to motivate enthusiasm for on-the-job behavioural change. We know from the research base that employees who have an opportunity to provide input into their training content are much more likely to perceive the training as useful and hence are motivated to learn and transfer the skills into their work (Baldwin et al.1991, Clark et al. 1993, Mathieu et al. 1993).

If we harness this powerful principle it has the potential to transform our approach to workplace learning where we quite literally create health and safety training champions from line managers and employees.

A short video of presentation of this article can be viewed here.

 Ian Pemberton is a chartered ergonomist who has a specific interest in the psychology of adult learning. He helps implements solutions for job-skills development and employee competency from a health and safety perspective. Ian is Managing Director of Human Focus. Contact via LinkedIn

References

Baldwin T. et al. (1991) The Perils of Participation: Effects of Choice of Training on Trainee Motivation and Learning, Personnel Psychology, Vol. 41, pp. 63–105

Clark C. et al. (1993) Exploratory Field Study of Training Motivation: Influences of Involvement, Credibility and Transfer Climate, Group and Organisation Management, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 292–307

Dale M., Bell J., (2000) Informal Learning in the Workplace, Volume 134 Research Report Series, Great Britain, Department for Education and Employment

Leonard D., Kiron D., (2002) Managing Knowledge and Learning at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory” Harvard Business Review, March 2002

Mathieu J. et al. (1993) Influences of Individual and Situational Influences on the Development of Self-Efficacy: Implications for Training Effectiveness, Personnel Psychology, Vol. 46, pp. 125–147