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Going to Training Extremes
March 19, 2008
Five back-to-basics lessons from deep in the training trenches of nonprofit organizations and government agencies.
By Sarah Boehle
Much as we might hate to admit it, the corporate world, for all its vicissitudes, is a fairly cushy place. We have our offices, our technology, and our climate-controlled comfort. With the exception of rush-hour traffic, we face few threats to life and limb. And for most of us, a "heroic" day at work is represented by little more than navigating the muddy waters of office politics without damaging our prospects for promotion, a pay raise, or some other professional plaudit.
For the training departments of nonprofit organizations such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and government agencies such as the Peace Corps, however, such myopic concerns likely seem insignificant—if not altogether trivial.
These organizations routinely send workers to some of the most dangerous, underdeveloped nations on the planet. Their reliance on temporary, short-term field workers and volunteers means they grapple with turnover rates that would stagger most private-sector HR departments. They operate under disproportionately waifish training budgets compared to their private-sector cousins. And for many, reliable Internet access and telephone connectivity in the field is questionable at best, nonexistent at worst—making basic communication a logistical hurdle and delivery of online training all but impossible.
Yet despite seemingly insurmountable odds, these organizations still manage to train their workers successfully and empower them to deliver on their mission. Here, a look at the training obstacles they face, the ways in which they overcome them, and the lessons we can learn from them.
Lesson 1: You Can Do More With Less
In the nonprofit and government world, budgets are usually bare bones and every dollar counts. Severe monetary constraints, however, often work in these organizations' favor—forcing them to focus on what's most important and find creative, low-cost solutions to common training challenges.
"Because we are trying to apply finite resources to infinite needs and have a responsibility to use donor resources effectively, we have to be more careful about the training choices we make," says Nicholas Lawson, director of field HR for international medical humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders. "There is less margin for error, and there is very little waste."
At the Peace Corps, an independent U.S. federal agency devoted to promoting world peace and friendship and helping populations in need, the training department is particularly adept at doing more with less. Through a combination of targeted in-country training and modest living arrangements for its volunteer trainees, the agency keeps its costs quite low. While the cost of training volunteers varies from country to country, for example, a portion of the agency's 8,000 volunteer trainees receive their initial 10 weeks of cross-cultural, language, and technical training for as little as $3,000 per head, including the cost of room and board.
Peace Corps Director of IT Planning and Training Fletcher Honemond attributes this feat to a "MacGyver mentality" that he says permeates the agency. "We are a culture that fosters innovation and creativity when solving problems—and people here know how to take a little and make a lot out of it."
The same holds true for Charleston, SC-based Darkness to Light (D2L), an interna- tional child sexual abuse prevention, education, and public-awareness organization. When the nonprofit launched "Stewards of Chil-dren Online," an online course designed to teach adults how to prevent and recognize signs of sexual abuse in children, much of the training was developed by using archival documentary footage featuring adult survivors of child sexual abuse, as well as new footage of experts in the field who donated their services for free, says Phoenix Possibilities Inc. Co-Owner Paula Sellars, who authored the curriculum.
Compared to the corporate arena, nonprofits such as D2L also devote significant time and attention to the front-end planning of their training to ensure the long-term shelf life of course content, notes Sellars, who routinely works in both the nonprofit and corporate world. To ensure the longevity of the Stewards of Children Online program, for example, Sellars and her crew developed every component of the training based on what she calls "universal" truths. "It is universally true that one-adult, one-child situations are not good when it comes to the risk of sexual abuse occurring, and it is universally healthy and good for parents and other adults to be able to talk to children about their personal boundaries," says Sellars. "By developing the training around these basic tenets, as opposed to taking a more culturally or geographically specific approach, we could ensure the program would stand the test of time for everyone, regardless of culture, socioeconomic background, or geographic location."
Lesson 2: Technology Isn't Everything
From enterprise learning management systems to real-time online classrooms, many trainers love using technology to get the job done. However, even if their budgets made investment in large-scale learning technology platforms possible, accessibility challenges largely limit what nonprofits such as UNICEF can achieve online. "We are trying to reach people who are sometimes in areas that are generator-fed and get only limited access to electricity a day," says Dawn Denvir, chief of the organizational learning and development section of the division of human resources at UNICEF, which provides humanitarian and developmental assistance to children and mothers in developing countries. "So, there's no way we can launch a beautiful Website or gather everyone together in a beautiful facility to conduct training."
One of her team's responses to this challenge is to pursue a blended approach to learning. The majority of the e-learning programs UNICEF offers to the field, for example, come in CD-ROM format, as well, which allows trainees without dependable access to the Internet to avail themselves of training by using freestanding public computer units at their posts when the opportunity to do so arises.
Denvir's team also pushes as much responsibility for training to the field as possible. Her team, which is based in New York, maintains responsibility for setting global training strategy for UNICEF and for developing "cross-cutting" training programs that are strategic in nature, such as leadership, management, and social-policy training. The development and delivery of the majority of UNICEF's training curricula, however, are driven at the local level.
Even when her group does develop training for the field, Denvir notes, it is careful to break course content into modules that include "multiple options" so individual regions can easily customize content to local culture and situations. "For example," says Denvir, "we'll instruct our trainers in the field to insert a role play at a particular point during training and provide them with guidelines regarding the salient issues they need to touch upon."
Lesson 3: Learn While You Work
Spending time and money finding ways to "mimic" the work environment during training is a luxury organizations such as the Peace Corps can ill afford—and perhaps that's a good thing.
"If you flash back 20 years, almost all of our pre-service training for volunteers before they were sworn in was conducted by American contractors in the U.S.," says Stephen Moles, a training design specialist in the overseas training division of the Peace Corps. "Flash forward to today, and more than 90 percent of the same training is conducted by local staff in the field. Over time, we realized that by training volunteers in the actual performance situations in which they will find themselves, skills taught in training more readily transfer to the performance environment."
Thus, beyond "staging" training, which typically takes place over the course of two days in Washington, D.C., virtually all of the training volunteers receive before and during their two- to three-year missions with the agency takes place in the regions and communities in which they ultimately will serve.
When Online Collaboration Program Manager David Smith was tasked with training Peace Corps volunteers serving in the Dominican Republic several years ago, he created an experiential learning environment by assigning actual field work to trainees. "During the 11 weeks of training, they did the same things they ultimately would be expected to do at their job sites," he says. "They conducted a needs assessment to determine what the community needed, developed a plan of action, and then worked with community members to enable their plan."
Trainees in the Dominican Republic also acquire a range of other skills, including technical expertise, medical and security skills, and foreign-language proficiency. "We train on more than 250 languages a year," says Moles. "The community-based training format allows us to do that at a low cost. By forgoing typical classroom exercises and tasking trainees with real-world assignments, such as going into the community to buy a loaf of bread, they are forced to put what they are learning to immediate use."
Lesson 4: Foster Knowledge Sharing
Knowledge management is a perennial challenge for organizations of every kind, but nowhere are the obstacles faced in relation to it more acute than at nonprofit organizations. Aid workers and logisticians at MSF, in particular, typically spend only six to 12 months on a mission before leaving the organization—taking their knowledge with them. Lawson's team relies on several low-tech, commonsense interventions to overcome this challenge. Whenever volunteers conclude an overseas mission, for example, they are required to complete a "handover report" that includes written documentation detailing their experiences and lessons learned in the field. MSF also is careful to rotate staff in and out of mission posts on a staggered basis, which allows workers who are departing the organization to spend one to two weeks or more in the field training their replacements. "We rarely replace whole teams," says Lawson. "In a mission of five or six people, perhaps one person per month will rotate out over a period of six months. Doing so helps us to ensure knowledge transfer and to maintain a sense of continuity in the field."
The Peace Corps faces another challenge. To ensure the freshness of the staff, a 1965 amendment to the Peace Corps Act requires that approximately 1,500 U.S. direct-hire full-time staff members who are in charge of recruiting, training, program support, health assistance, and logistical coordination for the agency's volunteers leave the agency after five years of service. In response, the Peace Corps, like MSF, ensures that well-documented processes are in place within every department, says Moles. "Likewise, all of our training includes detailed learning objectives and competencies, as well as rigorous documentation of the content and lesson plans that support them."
Lesson 5: Mission Matters
For all of the obstacles faced by these organizations, there is at least one area in which they enjoy an advantage over their corporate counterparts: Volunteers and other personnel who join up are not motivated by money. They come aboard, says the Peace Corps' Honemond, because they believe in the organization's mission. "The authenticity of our brand is strong. It's why people come here, it's why people stay, and it's why we as an organization and a department are able to accomplish what we do. Our people identify, in a powerful way, with our mission."
So the next time you're sweating bullets over budget details or other training concerns, consider trading your perspiration for inspiration. Who knows? Winning mission-critical buy-in from your organization's personnel just may make heroes of you all.
For a case study on nonprofit organization BELL and PR tips for nonprofit professionals, visit www.trainingmag.com/training2008articles.
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