All the events of recent years, from the pandemic and war at the borders to supply chain disruptions and de-globalization events moving from isolated to systemic, have left their mark on both corporations and employees.
The sudden change in companies' short and medium-term strategies continues to push the limits of employees' ability to adapt, to unlearn and relearn certain processes and activities. Practically, the entire concept of performance is being rewritten in different terms, accelerating the need for efficiency in the act of learning.
Thus, as they enter new paradigms of thinking and acting, companies understand that training as a “learning event” has limited effectiveness (real impact: max. 2.5 out of 10 participants learn something, according to studies conducted by The Kirkpatrick's). A one-off skills development course, or a physical or online workshop, is no longer enough (or perhaps it never was). The transformations we're going through at a societal level demand a transformation process at the individual level as well.
An alternative with clearly superior results (6 out of 10 Participants), according to the same studies conducted by The Kirkpatrick's, is the learning model called High Performance Learning Journeys (HPLJ), assisted process-journeys for developing performance at the individual level.
Developed together with Robert Brinkerhoff (one of the great international experts in effective learning processes and evaluating training process effectiveness), HPLJ programs offer organizations a certified method for designing learning processes that optimize 5 essential factors of effective learning:
- On-the-job applicability
- Management involvement
- Social learning
- Learning journeys unfolding over time
- Business impact.
HPLJ programs are run through the Promote platform, a tool that supports the development journey, bringing together know-how transfer modules, social interaction, gamification principles, individual or group assignments and projects.
Because the classic approach of one-off training has repeatedly shown its limitations, HPLJ is developed using a logical 4-step sequence:
- Personal commitment to the development journey. As long as an employee is motivated, they will work hard on their own development. Thus, this first step requires management involvement and the construction of an image of personal success – how it feels, what it looks like, what behaviors drive it. The method used in this first step is coaching.
- Building the knowledge foundations. Each employee will receive exactly the minimum amount of information necessary to increase performance, and no more. They will acquire it through individual study, not through transfer. The webinars and in-person courses throughout an HPLJ are dedicated to practice, not teaching, and this brings better results in the long-term manifestation of desirable behaviors.
- Developing and practicing skills. This is the ideal step in which newly acquired skills are repeatedly tested, and feedback is used as a tool to facilitate performance growth.
- Consolidating results. This is the last step, in which the newly learned and developed skills are tested in the work environment and continuously developed through several methods.
All these steps take place over periods ranging from 2 to even 12 months (for complex programs) to ensure a gradual and continuous development of skills; from a low level of complexity towards higher levels, involving colleagues, managers, trainers, clients and various other stakeholders in the process.
An extensive study conducted by BEI (Brinkerhoff Evaluation Institute) across 7 different industries (FMCG production, aviation, industrial manufacturing, healthcare, construction, automotive and banking), in which HPLJ programs run through the Promote platform lasted 6-12 months, demonstrated that their use resulted in:
- an extremely high level of transfer of learned aspects into day-to-day performance,
- desirable behaviors sustained 3-6 months after the program ended (compared to a maximum of 1 month in the case of regular training sessions)
- very high levels of engagement from participants
- very high levels of taking responsibility for development – even without management support
Compared to traditional training programs, in which only 1 out of 6 participants achieves quantifiable results and demonstrates sustained performance after a training session, using the HPLJ methodology exponentially increases this percentage – 81% of participants show a substantial increase in performance in the long term, not just immediately after completing the program.