Books

I just read a pretty good chapter on training program design. Not something I’m normally interested in, but this was a good chapter by M. Anthony Machin called “Planning, Managing, and Optimizing Transfer of Training.” It’s in a book called Creating, Implementing, and Managing Effective Training and Development. What I liked was that they did a fine job of straddling the line between scientific discourse (using a model, citing research, posing hypotheses, etc.) and real practical advice (“to accomplish this, do these things”).
Machin divides the discussion up into thirds, and talks about viable goals for each phase. During pretraining, he discusses how to improve trainee motivation to learn, improve self-efficacy, and build support for training. During training, it’s about improving the quality of the training, building intentions to use the training down the line, and improving people’s reactions to the training. Finally, during post-training it’s about further improving the climate for supporting training transfer and improving overall group performance via training application.
Also, to even things out, I just finished The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King. It’s either the 3rd or 4th time I’ve read it. Can’t remember which.