Thinking About Training - 3 Levels to Mastery

A few years ago, I led a team facing a massive training challenge. Because of some upcoming organization changes, we were facing the risk of multiple changes of team members working on complex technical projects. This was no small challenge. It was a change that could impact over 1,000 professionals working across more than 300 projects. There was a risk that people would leave during the transition, and certainly lots of project handovers to be anticipated.

We had to figure out how to organize ourselves for such a massive training challenge, particularly in the area of project-specific training.  Each project had an overall Protocol that explains with technical instructions, but each project also required technical instructions on specialized equipment as well as some very specific background information to provide some scientific context to the experiments we were conducting.  While the people affected knew their jobs and general company processes well, we still had to figure out the most efficient way to prepare to deliver all this training on demand.

We came up with a clear way of considering all the things that go into preparing someone to work on a new project. I conceive of this as three levels of knowledge:

1. Core Training includes the essential, “core” elements that are unique to the project. This would include the project description and master protocol, as well as the key disease information (in our case) and the information about the key, unique assessments. We created a list of core training modules that all project teams needed to provide and have uploaded to a central Learning Management System (LMS).
2. Extended Information includes the Core, plus all the other manuals and instructions about how to set up the project at a particular site, and the processes to ensure the people actually doing the project are set up. This could be 100s of documents, and it would be impractical for us to try to manage all of these things centrally, but the project team should have an idea of what would be on their “long list” of process documents.
3. Mastery involves understanding all the information in the core and extended materials, but it also involves knowing how all these things fit together and developing certain instincts about risks and challenges that may not be captured in those manuals or in the training modules.

While Core and Extended materials can be “trained” and tested using written, presentation or in-person courses, mastery requires a level of experience and practice that’s impossible to substitute. Mastery is the main reason we still have apprenticeships and residency programs in many professions and trades.

Looking at it a slightly different way, think about a project person completing all those core training modules, and then reviewing and studying most of the materials and manuals in the Extended information. Even after they had completed that, they would still be unsure how to actually get started on the project, unless they also had some level of mastery around their broader role and context.

Projects in all industries are getting more complex and there’s more information to keep track of. Our training challenge is to figure out how to move people along this full learning curve: training and assuring full competency on the project-specific Core Training, then making sure they have access to all Extended information they’ll need to understand the relevant technical instructions and finally to ensure they can efficiently arrive a level of consolidation and confidence that constitute Mastery.