Better Skill Development: It Plays in Peoria

 

The winner of the 2011 Optimus Award for Managing Change goes to the city of Peoria.
The one in Arizona.

Why? They created a registered apprenticeship program to develop in-house talent.

Apprentice program? What is this  - back to the future? Weren’t apprenticeships used in a bygone era to develop wheelwrights and blacksmiths?

On the contrary, such programs are still popular in many unionized specialties, just not common in municipalities.

Peoria had a problem filling positions in their wastewater treatment plant right when a large amount of existing workers were soon retiring. (This started before the Great Recession kicked fully, but there is always the problem of high school students somehow overlooking wastewater treatment as a career.) The Peoria program built loyalty and quick expertise pairing traditional classroom learning with plenty of "quality time" with experts. Not only did the experts train quickly, but the apprenticeship engendered a feeling of loyalty.

Sure, you say, but what about an expertise on even a higher level? Would coaching work there? Why, yes it would.

Surgeon Atul Gawande writes in the New Yorker* about how a 20 minute conversation with a retired colleague improved his performance more than the previous five years of experience. This is a surgeon who went through extensive training, remember. Gawande explains in his article how he researched how coaching was used successfully in helping teachers. A value-add there was that the coached teachers adopted the new skills far better than those who took other types of training on the same skills.

Even as more and more technology is used to train workers, many companies are using one-on-one coaching. There is plenty of research backing up the effectiveness of coaching. The problem is that it is relatively expensive. Maybe that's why it's mostly used for senior executives.

What should you do as project manager?

• Use one-on-one coaching to quickly build sophisticated skills in workers who are filling positions requiring rare expertise.
• Bring in experts to conduct this training
• Plan to use these experts for a prolonged period rather than a week. Hire them from outside if you don't have them available internally for longer-term coaching.
• And consider getting yourself a coach: Someone who can watch your performance and give you feedback that you can use immediately. Once you improve, bring them in a gain to watch your performance. Just like sport figures do.

Remember: Perfect Practice Make Perfect