Perspectives in Training - or Why Start Now?

We were into our second hour of listening to a speaker drone on about interpreting our facility’s electric bill. My mind was as glassed over as my eyes, when I happened to glance over at one of the four Administrators from our company who were with me at the seminar. She looked at me, and nodded in that way that told me she understood exactly how I felt – this was the single most boring moment of our lives. And, we’d done it to ourselves.

In our effort to meet licensing requirements for Administrator Continuing Education Units (CEUs), we’d signed up for a 2-day conference held in a nearby casino, thinking that even though the topics were horrid, we’d have some fun after hours gambling.

Instead, we’d spent the night wrestling with sheets that never quite stayed on the mattresses, followed by $10 breakfasts of soggy toast and dried out eggs. The casino was so smoky we couldn’t find each other across the room, and we’d all lost our gambling money. We were really having some fun now!

We came home from that conference determined to change our company’s approach to continuing education – once and for all! Never again would we attend a class just because we needed the credits. From now on, we were going to choose only classes that truly interested us, and that we believed would help us run better facilities, no matter what that took.

Since then, we’ve gone to all corners of the country seeking out the very best training opportunities we could find. Along the way, we started developing our own alternative to boring classes that allows us to complete those pesky required CEU hours without leaving our homes or offices (check it out on www.EasyCEU.com ).

But what else we gained from this decision has been staggering: we learned techniques to make teaching our own staff inservices fun and effective (really!); we improved our skills as managers, and we added features each year to our own facilities to make them continue to stand out from the competition.

We came home from these carefully chosen conferences fired up and excited. We had new things to try to motivate staff! We had new ideas for delivering services to our residents and families! And we knew a new marketing secret or two!

And guess what: our facilities prospered financially in ways we had not achieved before, when we were just trying to meet the requirements. We could afford to travel to these national conferences, and stay an extra few days to take in the sites of whatever part of the country we traveled to. These “retreats” helped our group of Administrators grow into a supportive team, willing to drop whatever they were doing to help each other out when needed – instead of competing for precious company resources like they’d done in the past.

We developed training games to use with our staff too, as our commitment to training in a meaningful way grew. For the first time, staff began to beg for even more inservice training, and our Administrators were able to provide that training (check it out on www.aQuireTraining.com).

Here’s what else we gained: a determination to see every employee in every one of our facilities, every day, come to work saying, “I love my job!”

We discovered that this love of the work of caring for our very special residents is more important that any other single employee qualification. With this attitude, we can easily teach skills and knowledge that each individual needs to do their job to the very best of his or her ability. Learning is fun, interesting, and helps them find even more satisfaction in their daily work of enriching our residents’ lives.

Every day we can “train” while walking through the building giving feedback, tips, encouragement and approaches to care. We can model a love of learning also, by coming home from our specially selected conferences excited about what we’ve learned, and eager to pass our new knowledge along to our team.

So I’m not surprised that every study about Assisted Living concludes, “We need more staff training.”

We do need training, but we need training that motivates, that stimulates, and that re-charges our batteries for this work we do. Just mandating more CEU or inservice hours is not the answer. We need individual facility and company commitments to making training meaningful, not just mandatory. Then, and only then, will we move this profession to a place where we’re not continually being threatened with ever increasing numbers of rules and regulations. We’ll start directing our own path toward a quality of service that will be welcomed by the public, instead of feared as “institutional.”

Opportunities for quality learning are out there – you simply have to look with an eye toward enriching your work, not just meeting your requirements. But you also have to be determined!