BSBLED401A Develop teams and individuals

NSW Assessment Tasks

By submitting this work I confirm that I agree to the College policy on original submissions. The work submitted herewith is my own work and original.

Please complete all  the assessment tasks below. This document can be copied and pasted into a word processing document.

Completed assignment can be submitted via the website or emailed to the College for assessment. Assessment of your work is usually completed within 48 hours of submission onto the website.

To submit your file/s, check your result and the Assessor’s feedback, please access the ‘assignment’ section of your topic.

Solution

ASSESSMENT TASK 1 – Multiple Choice Questions

Please review the questions below and select the most correct answer, eg c or d or a etc

1.Which of the following attitudes to training, help create learning organisations?

a) Develop learning plans as part of individual performance plans

b) Facilitate individuals/teams access to learning opportunities

c) Training is a waste of resources when the department is busy

d) Support workplace environments which facilitate learning

e) All of the above

f) a), b) and d) only

2. What elements are fundamental to developing learning plans?

a) Organisation’s strategic business plan provides direction for individual/team learning plan

b) Training and learning is taken for its own sake

c) Take time to consider the training requirements of your employees

d) All of the above

e) a) and c) only

3. Accidental and spontaneous learning should be planned and orchestrated by the manager.

a) True

b) False

4. What are some of the “barriers” to sharing the learning?

Lack of information about the benefits

a) Threat to the power of experienced, long term employees

b) Organisational climate with low trust

c) Cynicism of any new program

d) Insufficient base skills (literacy and numeracy) to cope with re-learning

e) All of the above

f) None of the above

5. How can you recognise workplace achievement?

a) Constructive, positive feedback

b) Constant acknowledgement and encouragement of efforts

c) Incentives and rewards to achieve

d) All of the above

6. What are the 3 main VAK learning styles?

a) On the job, Off the job, Structured

b) Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic

c) All of the above

d) None of the above

ASSESSMENT TASK 2 – Short Answer Questions

100-200 words (1-2 paragraphs)

What is a learning organisation?

Answer: A learning organization is one where individuals, teams and the organization are continually learning to enhance their abilities to shape their own future. In such organizations, individuals make deliberate attempts to teach each other. If for instance an individual has successfully completed a project, they will try to assist others to complete similar projects by telling them how they did it and helping them to pre-empt any potential challenges that they might encounter before commencing the project. This goes a long way in saving the organization’s resources because it helps them to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

In essence, learning organizations are founded on trust. In order to learn from each other, individuals within the organization must be prepared to trust each other. This is especially the case for middle level and senior managers who have to ensure that employees are cognizant of the organization’s mission vision goals and objectives and how it plans to achieve these objectives.

How does your organisation support a learning culture and what learning opportunities are available?

Answer: My organization offers learning opportunities to all its employees by organizing workshops and seminars for them to enhance their skills. Additionally, it strives to promote a teamwork culture so that it can encourage individual employees to learn from each other. Moreover, it promotes innovation and invention at the workplace by challenging entrenched individual and organizational beliefs and encouraging the adoption of new paradigms. Employees are also involved in the formulation of short-term organization goals and objectives, which incorporate learning as one of the major objectives. This helps to build a sense of ownership, which motivates employees to enhance their capabilities in order to improve the overall performance of the organization.

What methods would you use to identify whether a learning need exists for your team members?

Answer: Looking at the current performance of the organization and comparing it to the desired future performance. This helps the organization to identify performance gaps, which can be bridged by improving the employee’s skills.

Identifying the changes taking place in the micro and macro-environment, which might provide valuable insights into the required changes. It is imperative for organizations to keep track of the changes in their external environments in order to improve their competitive advantage over other key players in the industry. If the organization’s performance is relatively dismal compared to other organizations, then this might be a likely indicator that a learning need exists for team members.

Asking internal and external stakeholders to suggest possible changes that can be made in the organization.

Informed guesswork: One can use intuition to determine the skills required by teams at a given time.

What is a Skills Audit and how would you use it to assess an individual’s skills?

Answer: A skills audit is the process of measuring and recording the skills of an individual or group of employees. This audit is conducted by employers to determine whether all personnel within the organization have the required skills to perform their job competently. To assess an individual’s skills, one must first identify all the skills required for a particular job through a skills analysis. Secondly, they should survey and record the actual skills possessed by an individual. Finally, the results of these two processes should be compared to identify any skills gap. While a skills audit on a handful of employees might suffice to determine the learning needs of the organization, the process can be expanded to incorporate an entire department or even the entire organization.

Describe the organisational requirements you should be aware of when identifying development needs; for example, confidentiality, access and equity, occupational health and safety.

Answer: Confidentiality: Managers should be cognizant of the fact that employees have a right to privacy. As such, while some training and development activities such as mentoring and coaching might require the employees to disclose personal information to their mentors, it is not only unethical but also illegal in some instances to disclose such information. Gaining employees’ trust might put mentors in a better position to determine their individual strengths and weaknesses thereby enabling the organization to identify their development needs.

Access and equality: This principle stipulates that all employees should be given equal chances for training and development. The management should therefore focus on the development needs of the entire organization as opposed to those of individual employees.

Occupational health safety: Organizations are bound by the law to ensure the health and safety of their employees. For this reason, they should ensure that their training and development initiatives do not violate the employees’ rights to health and safety.

How would you create a learning environment in your workplace?

Answer: I would create a learning environment at my workplace by facilitating one-to-one instruction, carrying out a task analysis, facilitating sequence learning, interacting with the learners, instructing through demonstration, structuring the instruction, coaching and mentoring and providing feedback.

What are the 3 main learning styles? Give a brief description of each.

Answer: Auditory Learning: Auditory learners often talk to themselves. They also may move their lips and read out loud. They may have difficulty with reading and writing tasks. They often do better talking to a colleague or a tape recorder and hearing what was said.

Visual Learning: Visual learners have two sub-channels – linguistic and spatial. Learners who are visual-linguistic like to learn through written language, such as reading and writing tasks. They remember what has been written down, even if they do not read it more than once. They like to write down directions and pay better attention to lectures if they watch them. Learners who are visual-spatial usually have difficulty with the written language and do better with charts, demonstrations, videos, and other visual materials.

Kinaesthetic learners do best while touching and moving. It also has two sub channels: kinaesthetic (movement) and tactile (touch). They tend to lose concentration if there is little or no external stimulation or movement. When listening to lectures they may want to take notes for the sake of moving their hands. When reading, they like to scan the material first, and then focus in on the details.

How is technology used in a learning environment?

Aswer: The use of technology in teaching and mentoring has over the years had a profound impact on organizational learning.

PowerPoint presentations made by instructors are very effective teaching and learning tools

Beemer’s are in turn used to project PowerPoint presentations, videos, internet sites etc. in seminars and workshops

Animated videos can be made and shared to explain difficult concepts

VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) such as Skype and Google can also be leveraged in teaching languages. This can be very instrumental for training expatriates.

Google Docs, wikis, blogs are tools being increasingly used on collaborative classroom/online projects

Instructors are increasingly making Podcasts of notes that can be downloaded to listen to as students commute.

How can team work be used to assist learning?

Answer: Several research studies have shown that collaborative team interactions generally increase learning within an organization. In fact, this type of learning is referred to as team-source learning, which is essentially the acquisition of skills from interacting with others in a team that contributes to an individual’s effectiveness. Team members with an orientation toward teamwork are generally more willing to share information and work toward group goals, which creates an environment that promotes individual team-source learning. Individuals who believe that being part of a team is important and essential to success are less likely to withhold vital information that might be useful to other team members.

What role does coaching and mentoring play in the workplace?

Answer: Coaching and mentoring is mainly aimed at providing personal support and guidance, especially to new and junior employees. This support could either relate to specific learning requirements or a wide range of experiences. Additionally, mentors will more often than not act as general advisers who direct new employees on matters such as company protocol, corporate culture, channels of communication, and acceptable practices within the organization. In this regard, the relationship between mentors and learners has to be one of respect and trust. As such, confidentiality must be respected and the needs of the learner kept uppermost. On the bottom line mentoring and coaching can be a very efficient way of passing on knowledge, skills, wisdom and expertise in an organization.

Why is it necessary to monitor and evaluate learning and how do these processes contribute to the development of learning organisations?

Answer: Monitoring and evaluation gives employees an opportunity to check whether their individual progress is consistent with the goals and objectives of the organization. Managers should evaluate the performance of an individual or a team for instance through observation, questionnaires, and checklists in order to determine the success of the training program. This not only enables them to determine how effectively the training program has been implemented but also whether the learning gaps within the organization have been successfully filled.
If this is not the case, it might also put them in a position to identify new training needs or more effective training programs.

What methods could be used to gather feedback and evaluation information? Briefly describe the benefits of 3 of the methods.

Answer: Direct Praise or Criticism: This is often used in informal feedback situations, but can also be used as part of formal feedback.

The Feedback Sandwich: The feedback sandwich is widely used and should be used sparingly. It’s a simple technique that employees are becoming all too familiar with. The idea is that you sandwich a negative between two positives. However, this approach has been criticised because it trains the employee to always expect a negative when they hear a positive, and it takes the focus away from the actual problem. However, it is especially useful for new or sensitive employees or in situations where the job is well done overall.

360 Degree Feedback: This is a tool which can be used in the development and the performance of employees. It is a method and a tool that provides employees with the opportunity to receive performance feedback from a range of colleagues including: his or her supervisor, team members (or direct reports), peers, clients or customers. The purpose of the 360 degree feedback is to assist each individual to understand his or her strengths, lesser strengths and development needs.

ASSESSMENT TASK 3 – Written Report (Learning & Development Needs)

(Guide – maximum 2 pages)

Identify a learning and development need for your sales team or an individual within your sales team. You have to provide a report to your employer for approval. When writing this report address the following points.

• Outline the role and responsibilities of the individual or team.
• Explain the methods and tools you used to identify the skill, knowledge or development needs, for example job description, self-assessment checklist.
• List the learning goals and objectives of the program.
• Consider the learning styles of the individual/team in designing the learning program.
• Summarise how you included the individual/team in developing the learning program.
• Provide a written program outline or session plan of the agreed learning, including a time frame and what resources and equipment are required (eg training budget).
• Write a summary of the organisation’s goals and objectives that support the learning and development needs identified.

 

Answer: Company X is a Public Relations firm that mainly specialises in promoting product launches for SME’s and Large corporations alike. To this end, the company employs sales personnel to facilitate direct marketing at the grassroots level. The main roles of the employees include selling the products of the company’s clients, participating in product promotion campaigns such as road shows and conducting market research. Due to the increasingly high competition in this industry, the company has recently ventured into event management, and intends to specialise in providing and decorating tents in corporate events such as expos and exhibitions. In this line of business, the company’s employees are required to market the firm’s brand at such corporate events. To achieve this, they should be in a position to communicate effectively with managerial and other senior personnel at corporate events and initiate contracts on behalf of the firm.

The management should consider the roles played by the employees in order to determine their training needs. Because the employees’ main role is to convince customers to purchase the company’s products, the training program should focus on improving their communication skills. Because different employees have different learning styles. The training program should be both theoretical and practical. Moreover, technology should be leveraged to make the program more interactive while at the same time facilitating convenience and ease of access.

Like most organizations, the firm is bound to experience resistance to change. As such, the employees were involved in the formulation program so that they would be more receptive towards adopting the change. This was done by asking them about the challenges they experience in the field and their suggestions on possible solutions to these challenges.

 

Goals and Objectives of the Organization

ASSESSMENT TASK 4 – Written Report (Monitoring & Evaluation)

(Guide – maximum 2 pages) 

This assessment requires you to provide a report to your Manager on how you will monitor and evaluate the workplace learning you identified in Assessment Task 3. Consider the following areas when writing your report.

• How do you plan to monitor and evaluate the performance of the individual or team? For example questionnaires, observation checklists etc.
• Discuss what kind of feedback you would require and how the feedback would be used.
• Give some examples of feedback questions you might ask and some ideas on how feedback responses could be used to develop future training strategies.
• Discuss how you will modify the learning plan if required?
• How will you document and maintain the records and reports in accordance with organisational requirements?
• Submit this report (maximum 2 pages) to your assessor together with a copy of an evaluation / feedback form you have developed to evaluate the training program.

Answer: Monitoring and evaluation of the employees will mainly be carried out by supervisors in the field. The supervisors will be required to monitor the interaction of the employees with clients in the field and report on their progress. To achieve this, both the employees and the supervisors will be required to fill out self-administered questionnaires, which will mainly be tailored to gather information about the employees’ performance. Moreover, their individual past sales records will be compared with their current sales records to determine whether there is any significant improvement in their performance. However, while these records can provide valuable insights about their ability to communicate effectively with clients, other factors such as seasonal fluctuations in demand and the products’ life cycle should also be taken into consideration.

The feedback I would require from the employees is whether or not they are finding the information they obtained from the training useful especially in the field. This feedback will not only be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the training program but also to determine if the skills gap has been bridged.

Example:

Question: Have you successfully implemented any of the communication strategies that you learnt from the training program? If yes, kindly elaborate, if not explain why not

Feedback: No, I have not encountered any specific situation that requires me to use the skills I learnt from the training program

While the above response might be genuine, it could also mean that the training program was either ineffective in terms of meeting the training needs of the employees or the instruction techniques that were adopted to train the employees were ineffective. In this case, the training program will have to be modified to meet the training needs of the employees. Moreover, the new training program will have to account for the fact that different employees have different learning styles and as such, they will have to make the instruction techniques more versatile.

The management should do everything in its power to promote employee development. Nonetheless, these efforts should be consistent with the organizational requirements. For this reason, records and reports will be documented and maintained in accordance with organizational requirements. To achieve this, the firm’s policy framework (which contains policies and procedures relating to issues such as access and equity, confidentiality, and occupational health and safety) will be consulted before making any decisions involving the training program.