People Alchemy – your learning transfer platform
People Alchemy is an LTP, which stands for Learning Transfer Platform. In a Chief Learning Officer magazine article, Robert Brinkerhoff describes an LTP as “a cloud-based software platform that wraps custom-designed interactions and learners’ engagements around and into more traditional employee development workshops and seminars. This creates a learning/performance improvement journey for each participant.” Download the People Alchemy flyer here.
It is a good description of People Alchemy. It is called “Drive” because it drives learning change into the workplace after a training course.
The success of formal learning depends on how well the learner can transfer their newfound knowledge and skills into the workplace, and generate new behaviours with a resulting improvement in performance.
You know that most formal training has less impact than we hope for, and you know it makes sense to support and encourage people after a training course to get the impact you want. That kind of individualised post training support, from managers and peers, is now within reach when you use a Learning Transfer Platform for their learning journeys.
As well as managing the journey, an LTP manages the measurement. You can put in place a variety of measures to quantify the success of the journey, to get data for ROI calculations, and to measure observable behaviour change over the course of the journey.
One of the biggest problems with post-training activities is learner engagement, and getting effective support from their managers. A Learning Transfer Platform will hold learners accountable for the activities they are assigned, and give you data and reports to understand who is stepping up, and who isn’t. It will make things easy for their managers and provide the managers with the support they need to make learning transfer happen.
Download this leaflet to discover more and share the key points with colleagues.
- Measure ROI data
- Performance improvement questionnaires
- Track behaviour change
Training Managers
When you spend L&D budget on training, you need to make sure you are getting good value, and that means getting the improvements in performance expected by the project sponsor.
Sponsors and business leaders care about observable change in the workplace, and want data from you to prove it.
Don’t be one of those training managers who spends money on training, but does nothing much about supporting the delegates and their managers to make the training stick.
Training Companies
When your trainer leaves the client’s building, you lose control over what happens to all that wonderful work you have done in the classroom. Use a learning transfer platform to manage that critical post training period when your good work survives or dies.
A huge part of organisational learning must happen through practice and structured application. This is 70:20:10 in action. So extend your reach beyond the classroom into the workflow with an LTP.
Become a truly full-service learning provider.
The People Alchemy process is simple
- Practice and experience, and reflecting on that experience, are fundamental to learning.
- The pathway sets learners up with activities to spread out over time so they fit in with their work. Activities could be questions to reflect on, content to review, experiments to try, conversations to have, specific actions to do, or anything else that would aid them to learn, reflect and embed what they need for their job. The learner records their reflections and can also discuss them on the forum.
- Every learner has a buddy or mentor who will hold them accountable for doing the activities, and debrief them to help the learner get the most out of the activities.
Focus on the outputs of learning
The goal of organisational learning has to be shifted away from the process of learning to the outputs of that learning.
It’s not what boxes people have ticked or which tests they’ve passed, but what people can do and how well they can do it that counts. The aim of the game has become the transfer of learning into the workflow.
The old tried and tested training course is not enough on its own. We have all seen the figures on how little of what is trained, is transferred, and then activated in the workflow. Sure, there are some things you are probably already doing to improve these figures, but to truly scale up what works, and get the measures to prove it’s working, you need a Learning Transfer Platform (LTP).
A Learning Transfer Platform acts like a wrapper around your formal training. It manages the pre-work you want to do, and this is particularly important where you are employing a flipped classroom model. It manages that critical immediate post-workshop period when people return to their workplace. And then a Learning Transfer Platform manages ongoing growth and practice to ensure that the material covered in the workshop lives, and results in changed behaviours.
Says People Alchemy’s creator, Paul Matthews, “Imagine for a moment that you’re the Chief Executive of a new business, and you’re offered a choice of two teams to work in your business.
Team One consists of people who are well-educated, have been on many training courses, and have lots of qualifications. The people in Team Two have done this sort of work before and have proven themselves capable of doing the work that needs to be done in your new business.
Which team would you choose?
It’s a question that I’ve asked CEOs, company directors, and managers, as well as people in L&D and HR in both the public and private sectors.
How did they answer?
Ninety-nine per cent of the people I’ve asked that question have picked Team Two.
Why?
They all knew that in the moment when a job needs to be done, capability to do the task counts far more than the amount of training someone has done or even the amount of knowledge they possess.”
