Monday, August 31st, 2009
Sometimes, it may not be cost-effective or practical to bring employees to a central location for a training session. Employees are often spread out among remote sites and locations. Bringing them to the corporate headquarters can be time consuming and very costly. Although such situations may prevent you from conducting the traditional-style training group session, you can still deliver an interesting training program with other alternatives. More organizations are supplementing their classroom-based training sessions with training videos and distance learning. Videos are an efficient and cost-effective means of dealing with multiple sessions and locations. A video is often quite effective as a method of demonstrating skills or presenting concepts. Videos often provide the opportunity to bring well-known experts into your session. Videos offer models of positive behavior, and therefore they fit nicely into the behavior-modeling approach to training.
The use of distance learning can be very helpful to organizations that seek to bridge the learning-delivery gaps caused by multiple geographic locations, time constraints, and other barriers to learning. There are many benefits of distance learning:
- Easy Access. Learners can access the course material at their convenience, when and where they need it.
- More Efficient. In addition to being economical, distance learning allows you to deliver training to a large number of people at multiple sites at the same time.
- Learner-Centered. In many cases, distance learning puts learners in control of their own learning, particularly web-based training.
- Simplified Distribution of Material. Electronic distribution of materials not only saves printing and postage but it also enables efficient and cost-effective updates to the existing material.
- Consistency.
- Better Use of Subject-matter Experts.
- Cost Savings.
If you are looking for online Computer Training Courses or pursuing IT Certification Programs, you must visit K Alliance. K Alliance’s computer training videos and distance learning products provide you with a quality and comprehensive training that will enhance your knowledge and skills needed to complete your IT certifications. K Alliance understand various principles and concepts of learning and apply an effective learning process that results in behavioral change. They know how to design their training programs, methods and materials according to the diverse needs of participants. Their effective training is learner-centered rather than information-centered. The success of K Alliance training program or initiative come from the use of a systematic approach to delivering effective instruction with high impact for you.
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Sunday, August 30th, 2009
The Futility of Forecasting
Having established that most investors—professional and amateur—underperform the market, the obvious question is, why? After all, professional investors are, for the most part, intelligent people. Just about all of them have college degrees, some from very prestigious schools, and they are required to pass multiple licensing examinations before being allowed to invest clients’ money. Similarly, there are a lot of very smart amateur investors out there. How can so many smart people fare so poorly?
Well, for the first—and perhaps greatest—reason, we don’t have to look far: It is the fact that we are human. Our own humanity—the way we think, the way we perceive things and feel emotions—has become a major topic in the investing world in recent years. There are even branches of science—behavioral finance and neuroeconomics—that examine how psychology and physiology affect the way we deal with our money. And, in general, the findings show that we humans are investing in the stock market with the deck stacked against us.
Some great research into this topic has been done by Money magazine writer Jason Zweig , who last year authored a book on neuroeconomics titled Your Money and Your Brain. One of the main points Zweig stressed is that human beings are excellent at quickly recognizing patterns in their environment. Being able to do so has been a key to our species’ survival, enabling our ancestors to evade capture, find shelter, and learn how to plant the right crops in the right places. Zweig further explains that today this natural inclination allows us to know what train we have to catch to be on time, or to know that a crying baby is hungry. Those are all good, and often essential, things to know.
When it comes to investing, this ability ends up being a liability. According to Zweig, “Our incorrigible search for patterns leads us to assume that order exists where it often doesn’t. It’s not just the barus of Wall Street who think they know where the stock market is going. [Barus were divinatory or astrological priests in ancient Mesopotamia who declared the divine will through signs and omens.] Almost everyone has an opinion about whether the Dow will go up or down from here, or whether a particular stock will continue to rise. And everyone wants to believe that the financial future can be foretold.” But the truth, he says, is that it can’t—at least not in the day‐to‐day, short‐term way that most investors think it can.
You don’t have to look too far to find that Zweig is right. Every day on Wall Street, something happens that makes people think they should invest more money in the stock market, or, conversely, makes them pull money out of the market. Earnings reports, analysts’ rating changes, a report about how retail sales were last month—all of these things can send the market into a sudden surge or a precipitous decline. The reason: People view each of these items as a harbinger of what is to come, both for the economy and the stock market.
On the surface, it may sound reasonable to try to weigh each of these factors when considering which way the market will go. But when we look deeper, this line of thinking has a couple of major problems. For one thing, it discounts the incredible complexity of the stock market. There are so many factors that go into the market’s day‐to‐day machinations; the earnings reports, analysts’ ratings, and retail sales figures I mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg. Inflation readings, consumer spending reports, economic growth figures, fuel prices, recommendations of well‐known pundits, news about a company’s new products, the decisions of institutions to buy and sell because they have hit an internal target or need to free up cash for redemptions—all of these and much, much more can also impact how stocks move from day to day, or even hour to hour or minute to minute. One stock can even move simply because another stock in its industry reports its quarterly earnings. Very large, prominent companies such as Wal‐Mart or IBM are considered bellwethers in their industries, for example, and a good or bad earnings report from them is often interpreted—sometimes inaccurately—as a sign of how the rest of companies in their industries will perform.
What’s more, when it comes to the monthly, quarterly, or annual economic and earnings reports like the ones I’ve mentioned, the market doesn’t just move on the raw data in the reports; quite often, it moves more on how that data compares to what analysts had projected it to be. A company can post horrible earnings for a quarter, and its stock price might rise because the results actually exceeded analysts’ expectations. Or conversely, it can announce earnings growth of 200 percent, but fall if analysts were expecting 225 percent growth.
Finally, let’s throw one more monkey wrench into the equation: the fact that good economic news doesn’t even always portend stock gains, just as bad economic news doesn’t always precede stock market declines. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, the market performed better during the recessions of 1980, 1981–1982, 1990–1991, and 2001 than it did in the six months leading up to them. And in the first three of those examples, stocks actually gained ground during the recession.
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Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
Characteristics of a Workplace that Values Learning
Begin the work of championing workplace with a clear understanding of the fundamentals. Workplaces that value learning demonstrate the following characteristics:
All levels and categories of employees have access to training opportunities.
Both formal and informal on-the-job learning are evident in the workplace.
Training that is offered is directly related to improving job knowledge and skills.
All Employees Have Access to Training Opportunities
It is common for companies to fall into a trap of providing training opportunities only to certain groups or in certain content areas. A common problem, for example, might be that mid-level managers and supervisors get the most training hours devoted to them, or that product quality, product knowledge, and customer service get the least. The inertia of doing what’s familiar can unwittingly construct walls of obstruction in the provision of training opportunities. When you look for elements of access, pay attention to the content areas as well as the to levels of employees who have been served. A workplace that values learning will have a record of providing training and learning opportunities across a broad spectrum of content and levels of employees. Remember that your job as a champion of workplace learning is to be everyone’s—the workplace’s—champion.
Both Formal and Informal On-the-Job Learning Are Evident
In gathering information about the nature of training and learning in your company, focus on the term learning so that you think in broad terms, not only in terms of classroom data. A workplace that values learning shows signs of learning occurring in all sorts of places—at work stations where two or three people are gathered solving a specific problem, in a customer’s training room where one of your R&D professionals is explaining the new system they just bought from your company, in the executive office where a consultant from outside the company is coaching one of your vice-presidents in a one-to-one learning situation, at an administrative assistant’s desk where a graphics specialist is showing her how to enhance Power Point™ presentations, at a team meeting where the team leader is using a flipchart to explain a new procedure for team accountability. Investigate which conferences which employees have attended recently and what they brought back from those conferences to improve their jobs. Focus on learning that makes a difference—learning that is effective and efficient. Think about the outcomes and the methods of teaching and learning that you discover on your search for evidence of a workplace that values learning.
Training Is Directly Related to Improving Job Knowledge and Skills
A workplace that values learning pares down training and informal learning opportunities to the essentials of what an employee needs to know in order to do the job well. Many companies have rushed into e-learning systems and off-the-shelf courses that are loaded with all sorts of interesting but unnecessary content. Many courses in current use at companies big and small are in need of streamlining, updating, and even eliminating. “Nice to know” is a guideline that doesn’t work in today’s workplace that values working smarter and faster. “Need to know” is the value statement. A champion of workplace learning offers training that is directly related to improving job knowledge and skills.
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