If we held a contest within your company today and asked everyone to create a bumper sticker that describes your training function, how pleased would you be with the results? Would the majority of the stickers be supportive and motivational, or would they poke fun at the pitiful nature of your efforts? A common summary exercise used in a training workshop is the bumper sticker exercise.
To summarize a topic and check to see if the participants understand the gist of the subject, the trainer will form groups and have each group create a bumper sticker.
I recently taught a social style workshop where I divided the room into the four styles of Driving, Analytical, Amiable and Expressive.
Each group was to create a bumper sticker that style would have on their car, matching the different characteristics.
It is a fun way to unleash creativity, while at the same time making sure that the learning transfer has occurred.
While a bumper sticker is usually on the back end of the car, for this exercise we should be thinking of your training bumper sticker as a marketing or vision statement.
What would you like every employee to think about your training efforts? What is the reason for your department being in their lives? How much a part of their employment experience is about learning? Could they do as well without your participation? I have to believe that the milk industry wanted people to believe that milk is something we all need when they came up with "Got Milk?" So would your employees get behind "Got Training?" as equally important to their work life? Would your employees support the successful 2008 campaign of "Hope & Change", or would they be more prone to summarizing your training efforts as "We Hope They Change?" While you may already have a slogan or vision of where your training efforts fit within the employment experience at the company, it is more important to assess how the employees see it from their perspective.
No doubt if you were to run a formal contest every single bumper sticker would be a positive affirmation, so how do you ascertain reality, otherwise know as the truth? Simply make it a fun activity that is completely anonymous! Find a wall down a hallway and have people paste their bumper stickers up using yellow sticky notes.
As the wall fills up, so does your understanding of reality.
Reality will be a mixture of good, bad and maybe even ugly.
However, it is your reality and the basis for improvement.
If you are weighed down with positive statements then you are probably on the right track and need to be cautious about changing much.
Yet, if the wall of fame turns out to be more a wall of shame, at least you now know the truth and can start making changes.
Look for themes among the bumper stickers.
Are they clustering around a lack of excitement? Maybe you are using too much of a particular media like eLearning, or just classroom training.
You may need to introduce virtual (webinar) learning, social media learning platforms, more simulations or just mix up the offerings.
With 4 generations in the workforce today, you need to be meeting everyone's learning needs in a variety of ways.
What if you notice a lack of interest in the topics you are training? Maybe you need to review and dust off the training plan and see what skill areas are missing.
When was the last time you offered sales training, productivity skills, or good old management development? Yet what would you do if you noticed that the trend seemed to be a lack of awareness over any training being available? Yikes! Now it would appear you have a marketing and public relations issue to improve on.
A client of mine recently started working with their internal marketing department to better inform employees of what training is doing.
I found that to be a really creative idea, and because marketing knows your company better than anyone, they should be able to provide some valuable methods immediately! So if you are not afraid of what you might find out, try the bumper sticker exercise.
Take a test drive and see where it leads you!