OJT for Managerial. Leadership, and Interpersonal Skills Training

TeamOJT Tip of the Month for January, 2008

ASTD's 2006 white paper, Bridging the Skills Gapâ states that when asked to identify the skills gaps their organizations were experiencing today, these ranked as the three most important:

Managerial/supervisory skills
Communication/interpersonal skills
Leadership/executive-level skills

The paper underscored the fact that bridging the skills gap is about more than improving workers' competence in science, technology, engineering, and math. There are also significant gaps in non-technical areas such as leadership, management, and communication that are equally important to the ability to innovate, collaborate, and compete.

A critical part of ASTD's action plan to take charge of the skills gap is to select appropriate delivery modes for learning opportunities -- instructor-led classroom, online instruction, informal learning, structured OJT, or a combination. For a long time, structured OJT was considered primarily appropriate for manufacturing organizations. Such is not the case anymore. Companies are very creative in applying structured OJT to not only technical skills, but also in developing managerial, leadership, and interpersonal skills. The process remains the same: conduct a needs analysis by identifying tasks that need to be trained; develop a project plan; write short step-by-step training modules; create training implementation plans; verify the training modules in the actual work setting; create maintenance and evaluation plans; and conduct one-on-one training.

Human Performance Applications
Phone: (206) 447-0860
FAX: (206) 447-3410
E-mail: diane@teamojt.com