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Accelerated Experience Method™
What
is needed is a new way to learn from experience. One method that attempts to do this is the Accelerated
Experience Method™. As
the name implies, the Accelerated Experience Method™ assists managers
to learn in a fraction of the time what they would need years to learn
from their own experience on the job.
It offers a way to overcome the weaknesses of ordinary
experience.
The
objectives of the new method are, first of all, to assist managers to
learn how to perform their jobs effectively.
Its purpose is to give managers the kind of experience they
need in order to learn how to handle jobs they are expected to
perform. It can be used to develop managers at all levels.
A
key factor in Accelerated Experience Programs™, that facilitates
learning to perform a job effectively, is that they are industry,
organization, and job specific. A
portrayal of the best practices of the most highly successful managers
in an organization enables program participants to learn what they
need to know to handle their jobs effectively.
These
programs are designed to give managers the same kind of learning
experience they would get from successful experience on the job. By exposing participants to the key success factors
identified by industry or government leaders, these programs are
intended to serve, as closely as possible, as a substitute for
conventional experience.
The
second objective of Accelerated Experience Programs™ is to assist
managers to learn what they need
to know before they are tested on the job.
The idea behind the Accelerated Experience Method™ is to avoid
the expense and risk of letting managers learn by trial and error on
the job.
The
third objective is to assist managers to learn much faster than their
own, ordinary experience can teach them.
A major objective of the Accelerated Experience Method™ is to
reduce the time required for managers to learn what they need to know
to perform their jobs effectively—in effect, to give mangers in a
fraction of time, the decision-making and learning experience that
would take one to two years to get by trial and error on the job.
Managers
and professionals rarely experience more than 50 to 75 significant
learning situations in a year, yet they have the intellectual capacity
to assimilate these learning experiences in a few days.
We believe that it is feasible to compress into 3 to 5 days,
the learning situations that require a year or more to experience on
the job.
An
Accelerated Experience Program™ that we prepared for pharmaceutical
district sales managers demonstrates the feasibility of compressing a
year’s learning into a few days.
A panel of ten experienced managers who were appointed to
evaluate a program designed to assist sales representatives make the
transition into management rated its effectiveness as a 4.5 on a 5
point scale in assisting new district managers “to learn what
experience would teach them during their first year on the job.”
It is possible to compress leaning if the key success factors
of a job are clearly defined and are effectively translated into a
series of job-specific case studies.
The
fourth objective of the Accelerated Experience Method™ is to assist
managers to learn to cope with the problems and opportunities they
will face in the future but have not yet experienced in performing
their jobs.
Ordinary
experience only teaches managers how to handle situations they dealt
with yesterday. Their
experience can not teach them what they need to know to keep up
with the accelerating rate of change that is constantly
reshaping their jobs. They
often are handicapped, therefore, in managing in our rapidly changing
environment.
A
major objective of the Accelerated Experience Method™, in contrast,
is to assist managers to learn how to cope with the problems and
opportunities they will face in the future.
It is tomorrow’s teacher.
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