Group/Individual Level

Knowledge and awareness - Education and training

Types or modes of training

It is important to provide people with formal training related to the implementation of workplace innovation and new technology. As mentioned elsewhere, people need to be trained three times: (1) before roll-out, people need basic awareness training (e.g., who, what, where, how, why, when), (2) very close to roll-out, people need basic operations training (e.g., 'how yo turn it on'), and finally, sometime after roll-out, (3) people need some advanced training ( e.g., 'training for masterey').

While many people have ambitious intentions for training, training programs are frequently either abandoned or training is crammed in at the last minute because of schedule slippage and management pressure to get systems up and running.

Costs are often reported as the reason formal training is not given. Yet study after study has illustrated the benefits of formal training in terms of technical success, implementation success, the amount of use of the new technology, the positive effects on the attitudes of employees, and more.

Training can be done either formally or informaly, internally or externally. There is no reason to believe that external training is always better than in-house/internal training. The problem is that because of time and cost pressures, many people think they can rely on informal or 'ad-hoc' training (e.g., people will just work it out for themselves) rather than sending the time and money on formal internal or external training programs. this is frequently not adequate.

There are several problems with relying on informal or 'ad-hoc' training for new technology:

• The quality of instruction may not be adequate or standardised.
• The non-equivalence of much of the training across different individuals and units may be very large.
• There are usually no records and no documentation provided to help with the management of the training process or with accreditation and transfer.
• There are likely no competence requirements or testing involved for either the trainers or the trainees.
• It is very likely that the trainingreceived is specific, narrow in it's focus, and confined to simple operations.
• There is likely no coverage of maintenance, early fault detection, and more complex applications.
• There is likely no attention paid to the big picture, no examination of the interrelated systems or integration issues.

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