Imagine a workforce made up of highly skilled individuals that have a comprehensive grasp of what is required from them on a daily basis. Not only do they have a great deal of adeptness and expertise, these employees also recognise the company’s core values and act in accordance with this.
Sounds like an ideal scenario doesn’t it? However, if they don’t have confidence or belief in their own abilities, this knowledge will surely go to waste. A lack of conviction or commitment could be devastating for your company, as targets won’t be met and deals won’t get closed.
In recent years, more and more businesses have looked to prioritise Confidence Based Learning over other training tactics and techniques. This way, the organisation can rest assured that its workforce has trust in what they are doing and can work towards shared goals with aplomb.
But what else do you need to know about Confidence Based Learning? Here is an overview of its main facets and features.
Origins of Confidence Learning
Dr James Bruno, a Professor of Education at UCLA, explained much of what we understand about Confidence Based Learning today. Through extensive research, he established a link between knowledge, confidence, and behaviour.
Through the combination of knowledge and confidence, appropriate behaviour will come to fruition and give individuals the empowerment to act. Furthermore, if confident about being correct, people tend to be more productive too.
However, this self-assurance can be a curse as well as a blessing. Those who are confident about false information can end up doing something that leads to negative or even harmful results. On the other hand, those who aren’t convinced by their own abilities can freeze in urgent or critical situations.
Establishing competency and confidence among your workforce
For most organisations, the only way of knowing whether employees understand their responsibilities and can apply knowledge in a quick, confident, and reliable way is to test them. However, there is a chance members of staff will answer questions correctly with a lucky guess.
On top of that, standard testing doesn’t get to the route of finding out the confidence and competence levels of employees. Thankfully, Dr Bruno has also come up with a methodology for this as well.
His 2-dimensional assessment generates a metric for correctness plus confidence for each question answered. Consequently, it is possible to discover what members of staff know and how confident they are about their knowledge.
This assessment model is a great way for organisations to identify what areas of learning employees need to concentrate on in order to achieve suitable levels of adeptness and expertise.
Generally speaking, there are four types of employee according to Dr Bruno’s assessment model:
Masters – Those who know the facts and can apply this knowledge confidently
Doubters – Those who know the facts but sometimes act with hesitation
Misinformed – Those who do not know the facts but are confident in their actions
Uninformed – Those who do not know the facts and recognise their knowledge is lacking
How to implement Confidence Based Learning
One of the best ways to implement Confidence Based Learning is through an eLearning platform. However, organisations wanting to do this must make sure their choice of software or solution already contains Confidence Based Learning functionality.
For example, an appropriate eLearning platform would encourage employees to learn a theme or topic quickly and then be tested on how well they can retain and recall this information over a prolonged period of time.
In many respects, this is what Wranx’s spaced repetition solution attempts to do. Through the use of daily quizzes, where employees answer how well they understand a question, both competence and confidence will grow.
Members of staff won’t get lucky with a guess but can be honest in their own assessment instead. Themes or topics they aren’t overly familiar with will keep on appearing until an acceptable level of understanding has been achieved, which is when new concepts can then be introduced.
You will find that employees are much more receptive to new information when it is spaced out over time rather than consumed all in one go. In addition to better long-term memory retention, this approach can also result in greater presence of mind and level-headedness as well.
The importance of Confidence Based Learning
In any working environment, the last thing you want is members of staff simply guessing what they should be doing. At the same time, you wouldn’t want employees doubting their own abilities when a grave or serious situation arises.
For these reasons, adopting a Confidence Based Learning approach when teaching or training your workforce makes perfect sense. By establishing a strong and positive link between competence and confidence, you will know what areas and which employees need the most attention.
Once any obstacles have been overcome, you should end up with a more proficient and professional workforce, capable of applying conviction to every decision they make.
