Many years ago, I was a professor at Ohio State University teaching flight education. It was there that I began to understand how people learn and saw that if the approach to learning was carefully designed and the quality was high, you could create better pilots faster. Along the way, I took a lot of flak from other flight education specialists who had helped establish FAA pilot credentials based on attaining a set number of flight hours; my basic conviction was that the quality of instruction mattered far greater than its quantity. I concentrated on placing pilots in challenging, real-world problem-solving scenarios. By spending more time training in simulators that produced poor weather conditions or aircraft malfunctions, pilots developed the decision-making abilities required to excel, and they did it faster than their counterparts. I paid attention to how people learn and I developed a curriculum that forced them to retain and apply their learning. Those approaches informed what became M-Pact Learning. Those companies that adopt M-Pact Learning approaches gain an advantage over their competitors, just as my student pilots did.
In my book M-Pact Learning: the New Competitive Advantage, I employ a number of case studies that originate with my company S4 Netquest. These case studies not only demonstrate the ins and outs of a number of transformational corporate success stories, but they also show the hard evidence of how they gained a competitive advantage. This is the strategy innovative companies have seized upon to give them a leg up. At its root, it’s pretty simple: well-trained, fast-thinking employees become tremendous assets. They keep customers happy, create efficiencies, and are adaptable as circumstances require. The employee who is trained through M-Pact Learning is, simply put, a better employee and a more valuable asset. And M-Pact Learning, because it is so thoughtfully designed, provides an additional competitive advantage because it not only makes your learning program effective, it makes it efficient, saving you time and money. Those case studies from the book offer evidence this is true. Here are just a few highlights:
- Large banking corporation (personal bankers) Responding to a poll that inquired about the employees’ confidence to complete their job demands, employee scores skyrocketed from an average of 2 (on a 10-point scale) to a 7 after completing our training. More impressive, in the reporting period after the first training, the bank saw a 50% increase in newly opened checking accounts and an increase in their cross-sell ratio;
- Global medical device manufacturer (surgical assistants) We reduced training time by fifty percent and trained twice as many associates in half the time;
- National instant oil change provider (technicians) We reduced time to course completion from sixty days to ten days while doubling the completion rate and increasing employee retention. The company realized an immediate savings of $238,000 per year simply by replacing the paper-based training manuals. You can read more about how we gamified learning for this client in one of my older blogs.
How great would your advantage be over your competitors if you could increase market penetration and sales, while simultaneously reducing both training time and budget? If your learning programs produced confident, satisfied employees intent on staying on for the long term with your organization, wouldn’t that provide a competitive advantage? To learn more, pick up my book M-Pact Learning: The New Competitive Advantage.