Get the Learning Styles Right
EVERY child has his own method of learning; the approach does not alter much as we get older. In an organisation too, every employee will have a different learning style. If your employees' personal learning styles do not match with the company's training and evaluation style, the results will be poor. On the other hand, if training and evaluation programmes are tailored to their learning style, your employees will quickly learn, remember and master things they are being taught; and everybody's results skyrocket!
Everyone has an extraordinary capacity to learn in many different ways. Think about how you prefer to learn things; do you learn through pictures, sounds or by doing things yourself?
How about when you recall what you have learned? Do you see images in your mind, hear the words of what you learned or feel the emotional and physical effects that memory has on you?
Do you learn best by seeing something? When somebody gives you new information, would you write it down so that you would remember it? When you sit in on a meeting, would you put greater effort to understand visual handouts even if they were not very good? Then you are a visual learner.
Do you prefer to let others talk about the idea, so that you can absorb and learn from it? Are you the type who prefers discussions to written material? When you have trouble understanding something, does it help if you say it out loud or talk about it? If so, you are an auditory learner.
If you are the type who prefers to learn hands on, by actually touching, feeling and fixing things, and by using your hands or body you are a tactile-kinaesthetic learner.
More than likely, you have one preference that is stronger than the other two. A learning style is simply a preference for the method by which you learn and remember what you have learned.
Knowing how to empower your employees to be able to use all three learning styles and optimising the evaluation and training styles used by your trainers to the learning needs of your employees can be critical to the success of your company.
Say, for example, you have a highly kinaesthetic, tactile employee in your organisation, and you want him or her to remember things in written form. All your efforts to train him/her will be put paid; because kinaesthetic, tactile learners have no idea how to be organised, they remember things in "pictures" like your more visual learners; neither can they remember things by writing them down. It would be best to let them learn by doing their own thing. The same principle applies to your visual and auditory learners too.
Once you get down to analysing learning styles of your employees, you might notice that some of your employees may be better suited to a particular type of job - one that more closely matches how they learn best.
Before assigning an employee with a job, or even formulating a training programme, organisations will have to optimise between what employees are going to do, how they learn and store information, and how they are going to be taught. When that happens, learning and training can become an instant success. When organisations make that extra effort to match the employees' learning style, their jobs and training needs, motivation will soar, communication will improve, misunderstandings will come down and productivity will increase. To top it all, your training programmes will work for everyone!
BINDU SRIDHAR
faqs@cnkonline.com
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