Business Tips: Training - Adult Learners - Part 2

The implications for the self directing nature of adults for trainers include:

* Developing a learning environment that supports this self concept where participants feel at ease and respected.

* Involving participants in the process of identifying their own learning needs.

* Encouraging the learner-teaching process to become the mutual responsibility of both participants and trainers. The trainers' role becomes more of a facilitator resource person and co-enquirer.

* Helping the participants manage their own learning and self evaluation.

Adults have already developed many patterned ways of perceiving and understanding through their past experiences so they have a well organised set of personal meanings, values, attitudes, knowledge and skills which simultaneously define, create and in some cases make them less open minded.

Adults can contribute to the learning of others because their experience renders them as rich resources of learning. Implications for training include:

* Relating new situations, materials and methods to past experiences.

* Acknowledging the past experience as an active component in learning and respecting it as a potential resource for learning.

* Employing training methods that use the learners experience - group discussions, case studies, role plays etc.

Individuals learn best things they perceive as necessary for them to know and to enable them to move forward to the next phase of development.

Adults have many roles, for example, parents, partner, friend and colleague. As adults move through life these roles change and develop. Development occurs when adults become ready to learn new skills and knowledge in order to help them move forward.

Implications for training include:

* Ensuring that the content of the program meets the perceived need of the participant and is relevant.

* Sequencing the content so that it keeps in tune with the participants development tasks.

Tomorrow I will look at how adult learning focuses on the problems of the immediate present.

Mike Hitchen
Mike Hitchen Consulting