Why Structured On-the-Job Training (S-OJT™)
What makes a company successful? Good products? Most advanced technology? Best customer service? All of these are important for success. But, none of these are more important than the people who work in the company. Specifically, it’s the knowledge and skills that people use to do their work.
Research shows that most individuals learn their jobs in the actual workplace, not in corporate classrooms or other off-the-job settings. But much of this learning is informal or unstructured, which often results in unpredictable training outcomes. Therefore, an increasing number of organizations have begun to use structured on-the-job training (S-OJT™), since it combines the consistency and reliability of formal classroom training programs and the relevance of learning in the actual work setting. S-OJT is defined as “the planned process of developing competence on units of work by having an experienced employee train a novice employee at the work setting or a location that closely resembles the work setting." The word “situate” means “to fix or build something in a certain place or position.” Similarly, SiTUATE emphasizes that training should occur in the most appropriate location, not in a classroom, but in the context of the workplace — either in-person or remote.
Unfortunately, the needs of organizations are constantly changing. The challenge for organizations is having the means to help employees update their knowledge and skills – or their competence – in the most efficient and effective ways possible.
Responding to Change in the Workplace.
Unleashing Employee Expertise.
Competence is a person’s relative ability to perform a task. Some people might be very good at a task –such as an expert. Someone else might be just beginning to learn how to perform the task, or a novice. By necessity, managers face the challenge of ensuring that the right employees have the right skills, at the right time. No other training approach has the proven track-record of meeting these challenges.
Now more than ever before, the tasks employees are expected to perform are undergoing rapid change on a continuous basis. What are some situations that affect changes in work expectations? Here are some common situations that might occur in your organization:
Bringing on new hires, whether they are full-time, temporary, or part-time
Promoting frontline employees to supervisory roles
Job rotation and transfers
Outcomes of a continuous improvement effort
Redesign of the work so that employees can perform a range of tasks
Introduce new technology as part of the production or service delivery
New ways to define the work setting, such as work from home
S-OJT Helps Organizations Address Competence Issues
S-OJT is one of the best ways that companies can address their competence issues. But, S-OJT does not make employees into expert employees immediately. No training program can do that. S-OJT helps employees to work independently, faster and better.
Unfortunately, most training that occurs at the work setting is unplanned, or unstructured. All of us have experienced unstructured OJT. Some people call unstructured OJT “Follow Joe training” or “Sit by Sally training.” This means that the training will be done merely by watching someone else do it. Unstructured OJT usually has the following issues:
• Rarely achieves the desired training outcomes
• Often includes inaccurate or incomplete content
• Relies too much on individuals to communicate
• Trainers often use different methods each time
• Employees are uncertain whether it’s appropriate to share
• Some employees fear to share their know-how
SiTUATE is the Next Generation of S-OJT
SiTUATE is an integrated training system that combines the effectiveness of structured on-the-job training (S-OJT) with digital technology. Trainees will still interact live with an experienced employee who serves as the trainer. Trainers will still use carefully-designed guides as the basis of the training content. Trainers will still deliver SiTUATE using the five delivery steps. And, most importantly, the trainee will still learn how to perform tasks in the actual work setting, not in a self-paced training or online environment. All of this will remain the same, except that SiTUATE will allow the trainer and trainee to interact from separate locations using an integrated WebRTC capability, a significant advancement. Similar to S-OJT, SiTUATE will lead to more reliable and predictable training outcomes, along with enhanced training transfer.
Why SiTUATE for Structured On-the-Job Training
Our mobile-friendly platform gives trainees everything they need to acquire actual job requirements.
Analyze the Jobs and Tasks
You can now easily analyze the duties and tasks of a job, and select those tasks appropriate for training. You can have SiTUATE provide the service to conduct the required analyses for you. No other platform provides easy-to-use templates for conducting the job analysis and task analysis. And, no other platform pre-fills this information so you can easily prepare the training guides.
Perform Skills Gap Analysis
Jobs are changing, so the challenge in many organizations is to systematically forecast what changes will occur in the near future. The Skills Gap Analysis feature of SiTUATE allows managers to compare a current and forecasted job analysis, and generate a pre-filled action plan that is integrated with other platform components
Prepare Employee Trainee Plans
Employee training plans can be prepared and are pre-filled with the tasks identified during the job analysis. This makes it easy to maintain and update what employees are expected to learn through SiTUATE.
Prepare the Training Guides
Training Guides are the documents used by trainers and trainees during the training, and they are easily prepared using the customizable SiTUATE template. Information about tasks are pre-filled from the task analysis. No more copying and pasting information from one document to another. SiTUATE does it for you, seamlessly.
Create Onboarding Training Guides
Onboarding becomes more accountable when there’s a training guide that shows the work processes new employees will contribute to and the tasks they will be expected to perform. All of this information is generated as part of the job and task analysis, and can be pre-filled to the Onboarding Training Guide.
Deliver the S-OJT In-Person or Remotely
Times have changed and now through SiTUATE organizations have the option to deliver the S-OJT remotely – in which the trainer and trainee are in different locations – or in the traditional face to face way.
Ensure Quality and Consistent Training Delivery
Trainers are guided to use five delivery steps when they deliver the S-OJT. The steps are proven effective through years of research and informed practice. Experienced employees become qualified as an S-OJT trainer through the embedded online train-the-trainer program that includes a performance demonstration requirement.
Evaluate Trainees with Embedded Performance Checks
Trainees are evaluated on their ability to demonstrate they can perform the task, not just on knowledge. Performance Checks are used to rate the trainee’s performance, and the ratings are done by the trainer or a separate evaluator. SiTUATE allows the flexibility to have ratings the based on a live performance or from saved documents, and more than one rater can participate in the ratings. Ratings from the Performance Checks are automatically updated on the trainee’s Training Plan.
Integrate with Existing HR Technology
SiTUATE can be used as a stand-alone platform or easily connected with most existing learning management systems or human resource information systems that are used in organizations today. There’s no duplication in features with these other systems, simply because no other platform offers the features as SiTUATE.