LatitudeLearning:

 

Jeff Walter (00:00)

Hi, this is Jeff Walter and welcome back to the Training Impact Podcast where we explore how training infrastructure can scale channel performance. I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the ASE’s Training Manager Council’s convention up here in Michigan this year and had a really interesting conversation about training programs and a roadmap for training programs and really the types of programs that move metrics.

 

So I thought you might enjoy it. So without any further ado, here it is.

 

I’m Jeff Walter, founder of ⁓ Latitude Learning, also host of the Training Impact Podcast. We’ve had a number of folks here on the podcast, it’s been great. And like I said, I learn a lot. We’ve already talked about a lot of this stuff ⁓ in terms of what we’re training and what we see. We’re measuring training, lot of course completions and certifications, but we talked about earlier what’s really important that fixed right first time, the technician efficiency.

 

And it’s really important that we shift if we want to move the metrics that we start focusing on the things that really matter. And so we kind of hit a lunch at that, so I’m just going move right on. This is a pedagogy. We’ve seen it. We’ve heard it a bunch of different times. It’s learn, do, teach. And it’s see one, do one, teach one.

 

⁓ You’ll hear it in different ways. The thing about this pedagogy, what we’ve seen, is that as you go from one to the other to the other, you see exponential increases in effectiveness and impact. And the question is, and when I see a lot of programs, both in this industry and elsewhere, because we serve other industries as well, a lot of industries, a lot of training programs are stuck in the learn.

 

I think this industry in far exceeds others in terms of the do, but you get very, very little teach, very little, and you heard that kind of earlier today, know, having technicians talk to each other, well that’s part of teaching.

 

We heard earlier with the classes, having people be able to have an instructor or somebody come in and see what’s going on. That’s the teaching. So as an industry, we do a great job on learn. We do a pretty good job on do, and that’s getting better. you know, or at least relative to peer industries, let’s say, we do a pretty good job there on a teach. We have challenges there.

 

And so, you know, building that culture of mastery, you have to take the teach into account. And here’s where you get into the coaching others and the peer learning and the certification authority and the best practice sharing. How are you going to do that systematically? So we kind of, with the learn, do, teach, kind of use that as the pedagogy to try and build a high impact training program.

 

Like I said, we all know the learn, the courses, the videos, the playbooks, product knowledge, a lot of fun things on the do, but we can do more and we’ll talk about that a little bit later. And then the teach is really where I think there’s opportunity to take our programs to the next level. One thing I’d say here that was really interesting, I was interviewing a gentleman at, I think it was Excel truck.

 

on one of my episodes, I think it was, they do, it was a Volvo truck. And so Volvo truck will actually certify dealer staff as instructors that can then go and teach a course that can serve, is it Volvo? No? Freightliner. Freightliner, thank you. Sorry. Freightliner. I was, okay.

 

But yes, where the dealer technician could actually become a certified instructor and then the dealer can actually host the course. So very interesting. First time I’ve heard of that. That kind of takes teaching to actually the next level, right? Thank you for correcting me. I appreciate that.

 

And so, kind of hit this already, what we do well as an industry is kind of we do learn very well, we kind of get weak on the do and it really breaks down on the teach. So I throw that out just kind of as a conceptual model to kind of have you back your head as we dive into some other more tactile things. But that’s kind of the overall vision of how we’re going and what we see be very effective.

 

and you guys all know this because you’re focused mainly on training people that don’t work for you. This slide isn’t there for other.

 

but really it gets harder when trying to train people outside the organization. We were having a conversation earlier is you can’t really direct them. You can’t tell them that they have to take the training. Sometimes you don’t even know who they are because they’re a franchisee or a dealer or some other partner. And so what works for employees doesn’t work for a dealer. works necessarily. All right, so.

 

What we’re starting to think of, and you heard this a little earlier, we need to rethink how we’re approaching training from the traditional view of courses and LMS, a bunch of events, completions, to more training becoming a system, not an activity. Having, creating training infrastructure, it’s a process. And when we’ve looked at other industries, in this industry as well, it’s the repeatable process, it’s the replication engine that allows

 

a network that have brand.

 

on it. What does it mean to be a Ford technician or a Chrysler technician or Nissan technician or anything else? It’s the training is how you make that stick. It’s the replication engine to channel performance. So learn to teach, training infrastructure, you’ve got your structures, you’ve got your workload, you’ve got your reinforcement.

 

You want to focus on role-based. We do that with technicians here. The learning paths on the workflows, onboarding, validating them. Again, the system is, it makes performance repeatable, it makes it scalable, allows you to separate through the network.

 

All right, you take that whole thing, the learn to teach, and how does it actually translate into a training program?

 

spend this year putting this all together, the training program roadmap, where you start off with unstructured learning. You kind of look at this as an evolution of training programs. You’ve got that pedagogy, that’s an evolution of training programs. Self-directed learning, it’s unstructured, people go do what they want. You got the knowledge acquisition.

 

Phase two or stage two where you have a required program. Just about everybody here probably has at least a stage two. Then you get into skill development. This is where you start introducing the do. You have them actually have practice and do things, participate, application, validate their capability. And then you go on to individual performance. Now you’re focusing more on the performance level. Some of those metrics that we talked about earlier coming out of breakout sessions in terms of fixed right first time, productivity,

 

callbacks, comebacks and all that. We’re taking it to the next level. You’re doing the type of thing that Freightliner is doing. You’re using NPS scores like some other organizations here. You’re bringing in performance metrics at the dealer level but then you’re also ⁓ systematizing that teach.

 

And so if we look at stage one, you guys are all doing this. But I think the thing that’s really interesting here is this emerging best practice. And we heard a little bit of it today. And that’s that AI-powered knowledge access. And it’s really unstructured learning, right? It’s the individual saying, hey, I’ve got a question I want an answer. And you heard earlier how many foot pounds do I torque this down to?

 

You know, you’re seeing that. I took the match from Design Attractive. He was on the podcast, thanks Matt, and he’ll be talking tomorrow more about AI knowledge access. So the big thing here is that’s an emerging best practice. You’re starting to see it. We’ve incorporated that into our platform as well. We call it the Learning Assistant, where you can curate content and then your learners can ask questions just about that.

 

It’s all about that AI knowledge access, getting instant access to information, unlocking that information so you can get questions answered quickly. That’s the big thing we see happening in self-directed learning.

 

Now we move on to knowledge acquisition. You guys are all doing this, fine curriculums and.

 

and courses, you know, your new careers get onboarded, you build structured courses and curriculums. Most of the organizations here have this type of thing in play, mostly at least stage two. But the thing, the emerging practice there that we’re starting to see is using AI to take that content that you have and have it generate the online courses, have it generate the assessment. And that’s really interesting stuff, you know.

 

But you saw Napa, much beyond that, where you bring in that. But this is just taking, hey, I’ve got a playbook. I have a standard operating procedure. I have a repair guide on how to do something and let the AI create the online courseware. And you’re starting to see that happen on different platforms out there. And then having the AI.

 

create the online assessment. We’re still sitting in knowledge acquisition. We’re not on to doing. We’re not on to skill development, just in terms of making it easier to acquire knowledge.

 

And we see this particularly in this industry, but in other industries. Our platform is really focused on external learning. We’re trying to train people that don’t work for you. And you’re usually trying to teach them how to sell and service your products. And there’s no course library, there’s no vendor out there you can buy courses from on how to sell and service your products.

 

And so we’re seeing this as a really great emerging best practice and a real promise of AI down at the, where the rubber meets the road.

 

Stage three, now is when it starts to get fun. What we’re really focusing here is the practice and validation of capability. We’re seeing organizations have historically, especially in automotive, you have a lot of tech centers where the people can actually practice some of this, but it’s the validation of the skill level. That’s the thing that we’ve been missing a lot.

 

So, you know, in the field, technicians can perform tests with guidance, managers observe. We see this also in the franchise industry also. My nephew went to go work for

 

Oh gosh, just blanked out my mind. The chicken place. they had, Chick-fil-A, thank you. I was like, chicken, chicken, chicken. But anyway, they had, and much simpler operation than a dealership, right? And much simpler than repair. But they had 10 skills that he had to acquire. And he had online learning to acquire the knowledge associated with those skills. And then they had a mentor.

 

that could then validate that he could work the shape machine, work this fry machine, all the different skills he had to learn so that he would become a certified step mother. So it’s kind of interesting. So here’s where I think we got a lot of great, you know, on the practices where you see the simulation and AI-based practice.

 

And with what we saw with NAPA, what Matt’s going to talk about tomorrow with design interactive, we’re seeing a lot of good things here as well. I think at the end of the day, this will be really good. But again, what we’re really focusing on here is trying to create verified capability within the network. And again, it goes back to this is doubly important for what we’re doing because these people don’t work for us.

 

So we can’t rely on manager performance reviews to see that the network actually knows what they’re doing. We need to have this capability baked into our training systems. Does that make sense?

 

then moving on to the individual performance where we’re taking it beyond capability to performance. There we’re applying the skills on the job, the performance measurable. It’s a lot of the metrics that we talked about over here on the technician side in terms of productivity. Our best practices are to connect that into the training. Use, you know, if you can get that down at the individual level, bring that into your assignment.

 

that they’re seeing a drop in a certain metric and therefore some remedial training is needed or at least investigate whether it’s needed. We’re also seeing that from a best practice at the field level or at the unit level. How many trained technicians does a certain shop need? How many trained salespeople, how many trained service managers do they need? And if they flow below that, you see the performance start to drop.

 

But at the individual level, that’s what we’re seeing and connecting the performance metrics to the training program. And then we go into the emerging best practices. Again, we’re starting to see AI work its way in there as well to do that. And you heard a little bit of that earlier in terms of…

 

doing the assessment and creating those very individually specific training programs, right, based on that. Now, we did that with an assessment of knowledge. The next thing would be to capture that performance information and do that with the performance data, right, if you can get that level of data. So that’s the challenge there.

 

All right. And if we’re able to do this and what we’ve seen is done, you get that measurable performance, but it’s not yet scalable. And that brings us up to stage five, where now you’re really focusing on a system that scales its performance.

 

getting back to the teach. You’re starting to see where people start to introduce the peer-to-peer mentoring, know, kind of the informal teaching that shared collaboration. And there are different ways to do that, but establishing, introducing the peer mentoring and shadowing, encouraging top performers within the network to share how they do their work.

 

There’s some really interesting tools out there that can enable this on social media where you can actually manage the social media where people can post things and get reviewed up and down from the individual dealer employee to the dealer to the brand.

 

as a brand manager, can manage all that. So that’s pretty cool. But yes, how do we encourage both the top performers to share their work, not just within their shop also, but across the network?

 

And that’s, like I said, where there’s some really interesting tools that allow that. Traditionally, you’ve got the old discussion threads and Reddit boards and things like that. But you can actually get more control within the network.

 

All right, and then we move up to stage five. I’m moving pretty quick.

 

Now what you’re bringing into here is you’re focusing on organizational programs. You’re establishing the train to trainer programs that we see at Printliner. You’re tying training to specific partner KPIs, making sure they have some type of minimal training requirements within their dealerships or their units, their locations. And you’re able to now scale measurable performance and you get more consistency.

 

And so in the field you got the top performers training and mentoring others. It’s a multiplicative type of thing. You don’t have to own all the instructors. You have other folks doing that, not only from an instructional standpoint, but from a mentoring standpoint. You’ve dispersed that knowledge out into the field.

 

and therefore it’s able to scale. And you event, prevent some of the scenarios that you see occurring a lot where you’ve got a few experts back at the brand, back at the OE or at the brand owner and they are flying, literally flying around the world intervening in emergency training.

 

that knowledge all bottled up in a handful of individuals within the brain. And so when we can get that out, get the network to teach itself, it’s got a multiplicative effect. So that’s the five stages in a nutshell, what I wanted to lay out there for you.

 

What we’ve seen and the way we’ve used this is if you look at those five stages and the best practices, and I realize there’s a lot of information in here. on our website. You can go there and find it.

 

It lays out a nice roadmap of how we can improve our program year to year to year. Because you’re not going to start and get to all of this all at once. But you can kind of look at it and sit there and go, hey, what am I doing here? Check, check, check. What’s my experience like here? What about here?

 

You know, what best practices are at FON? Am I really getting the knowledge acquisition? Is that occurring? What about here? And you can kind of go through it and then sit there go, I’m going to introduce this best practice next year. And then as you work through your way through, can see the whole.

 

That’s that quickly. Any thoughts or questions? All right. So now the next question is how do you bring out all to fruition? And we developed what we call the 10 training work streams. And they really fall into three categories. So again, this is all a way of looking at your training program to try and figure out how to improve it over time. All right. So we just look at, OK, I want to put in the learn to teach pedagogy.

 

I take that and I broke it into, and I want to build my training infrastructure. So then I ask myself, what type of training program do I want to put in place? Those are the five stages and the best practices, the type of program I want to put in place. Now, how do I do that? And that’s these 10 work streams. And if you look at your programs, you’re probably doing all of these to some degree, either formally or informally. So the first we have is the configuration. This is designing your system.

 

Remember, we’re trying to systematize everything. We’re turning training into infrastructure, a systematic way of doing things. And first thing you have to do is organize your learners. Here we have dealerships. We have the types of learners. What level are they at? Are they bronze, silver, gold? Level one, two, three.

 

We also have multi-unit dealerships, right? So you have owners that own many, many locations. You want to be able to organize them so that somebody back at a multi-unit dealer can see all their dealerships and see all their people, and they can see where they are at in various levels and move people around. But organizing your learners, that’s one thing. Organize your training content.

 

We talked about the knowledge, we talked about courses. You have a lot of that. How is that organized? Can everybody see everything? We have some clients that have multiple brands under one roof, and the brands are competitors. And so the way they organize their content is some of the content is shared, some of the content is available to one brand, brand A, some of the content is available to brand B. So how you organize your content.

 

Do you put it into learning paths? Do you put it into certifications? Do you create skill profiles with skill levels and skill areas? And do you tag it? So that’s kind of on the organization. And then designing the learner experience when they come online.

 

What do want the experience to be like? Is it easy for them to get what they need? Is it complicated? Can they find what they need? Okay, once you go from that, you get into administration, the whole process of creating the training content. That’s pretty straightforward. That’s changing over time as we get more into AI-driven stuff. How do you do that? Managing learning access. Usually at the OEM level, they usually have systems like Dealer Connect or Chrysler where they’re already capturing

 

all that other organizations they don’t necessarily know who works at the dealership so we’re at the locations and so you have to delegate that out to your

 

your partners. And so what’s the process for that? How are you going to assign training? How are you going to track training? And then we get over to some of the strategic things. again, I think we as an industry do the first two pretty well. On the rewards and recognition, we do that really well at a dealer level. And depending on who we’re at, we may or may not do any of it at the individual level beyond badging and other things like that.

 

And how are we measuring success? For most programs, we’re measuring success by the number of course completions, butts in seats, or even certifications, not measuring success on the impact on the performance of a trained person versus an untrained person.

 

When we talk about those stats over here or those metrics over here of something like technician proficiency, the real question is not technician proficiency. The real question is what is the proficiency of a trained technician versus an untrained technician? And that’s where you get the value of your training program.

 

And when you can do that, when you can measure that, whatever the important metric is, whether it’s proficiency, fixed right first time scores, customer satisfaction scores, when you can say a trained tech performs at this level and an untrained tech performs at that level, it opens up budget. Because everybody can do the math.

 

that a 15 point higher fixed right first time score translates into this much lower warranty costs. It’s very easy math to do. So easy even a CEO can do it. So how are you measuring success? Are we measuring it based on activity or are we measuring based on output or based on impact? And then do we have a process for ongoing improvement?

 

That’s the 10 training work streams. And now the question is, where are you today? When you look at your training program, are you stage one, two, three, four, five? What best practices are you engaging? What ones would you want to do tomorrow?

 

And, you know, when we look at those work streams, are they informal, are they formal, are the processes written down, are you, is there a, I would argue that for most folks, good on the configuration, good on the administration, not so much on the how do we can do the continuous improvement, that tends to be more of an ad hoc process rather than a systemic process. And then.

 

know, again, the challenge here, and it gets back to some of the other things we were talking about about the industry, is we kind of know what we need to do, but it’s turning into a repeatable system that scales throughout the entire network. That’s the hard part.

 

know, gay, back, wise, and moving actors? Restalled at the knowledge level. We don’t get into the do and the teach level. Or sometimes the execution is incomplete because the structure’s not training by role and people don’t know how to get to the training they need. Or there’s no connection to performance metrics. So we don’t, you know, there’s not a feeling within the network that the training is gonna make a difference. And if they feel that the training’s not gonna make a difference, they’re not gonna take the training.

 

Okay, so it’s not because of a failure effort, but because we haven’t built it in.

 

And that’s it. Get back to training. Training doesn’t move metrics, systems do. How do you turn your training program into an ongoing system that you continue to

 

And that’s me covering that very quickly. And the last thing, know, been doing this for over 20 years. Since our last session, I started doing the podcast and that triggered a lot of things. And ⁓ I published a book a couple months ago called the Surefire Trading Impact. And…

 

there is anybody here that is interested in the book, will happily send you one for free. So just come up and say, hey, I’d like a copy of that. I’ll shoot that out to you guys. You can go onto Amazon and buy it, but I’d be happy to just send you one. And that’s it. Any thoughts, questions, comments, concerns?

 

All right, man.

 

Thank you.