This book presents a research thesis of a large-scale study conducted with over 50 large organizations in 7 countries with 80 business leaders to understand how businesses speed up the proficiency of their employees to meet business challenges. The book describes a start-to-end research study that explored the concept of 'accelerated proficiency' of employees in organizations. The book is organized into five chapters. The book introduces the concept of accelerated proficiency in a business context in light of reviews of four decades of classic studies. The research methodology to identify sources, recruit participants, and the mechanism to collect as well as analyze data have been explained in detail. The book reveals six business practices implemented by organizations across the board that seem to make a major impact in shortening the time to proficiency of employees. Important observations and findings have been discussed as implications in regards to how organizations orchestrated six business practices as an input-output-feedback system to reduce the time-to-proficiency of the workforce. The book briefly explains how these six practices were implemented through a set of twenty-four strategies in various contexts. The concepts and findings discussed in this book contribute significantly to the body of knowledge on accelerated proficiency. In particular, the conceptual model and the framework developed in this study can be implemented across a range of contexts, business sectors, job types, and settings to reduce the time-to-proficiency of the workforce.

Time is money and a reduction in time should be the first goal of any training program or any employee development initiative. The skills and knowledge acquired today become irrelevant or obsolete quickly. In that kind of dynamics, the organizations have shifted focus on how to shorten time to proficiency of employees and bring them up to speed to the required performance in a shorter time. This book intends to establish scholarly know-how on this construct of Accelerated Proficiency and provide practitioners and researchers with a condensed and coherent knowledge-base on this burning business concept. The book explores concepts, themes, nature, and challenges associated with the process of accelerating proficiency. This book discusses the business metrics of time to proficiency and speed to proficiency. This book is organized around reviews of studies on performance and proficiency from several different disciplines spanning over five decades. In particular, this book will enable you with the answers to some crucial questions - What is the nature of the proficiency in the organization? What is the meaning and goal of accelerating proficiency? Whether or not proficiency and performance of employees can be accelerated? What kind of methods has been researched and proven to accelerate proficiency?

This ground-breaking research report enables you to get unprecedented benefits in your business and in getting a competitive edge as a manager, practitioner or consultant. This research report brings you practical information on S2Pro© Speed to Proficiency Model in a practitioner’s language without academic jargons. The report contains highly relevant and practice-oriented findings, enriched with implementation recommendations for practitioners to reduce time to proficiency of your employees drastically and save dollars. Time-to-proficiency is becoming one of the most important business metrics for fast-paced technological organizations. Most of the organizations in the fast-paced business realize that the faster employees learn the skills required to do the job up to set performance standards, the faster they can handle new customer needs, meet new market needs, perform to new expectations, and deliver new technologies or adopt new changes. The speed of skill obsolescence with the pace of increasing complexity drive great necessity for organizations to figure out the methods and strategies to accelerate time-to-proficiency of their employees. Developed through five years of extensive practice-based doctorate research in Australia, this report provides organizations and practitioners with a credible and detailed framework to implement Speed To Proficiency Model.

The book offers condensed summaries of twenty-three major skill acquisition and expertise development models presented by leading researchers during the last half a century of classic and new research. This book presents new researchers in learning, training, cognitive sciences, or education disciplines with a big picture starting point for their literature review journey. The book presents an easy-to-understand taxonomy of twenty-three models, giving new researchers a good bird’s eye view of existing models and theories. They can decide which direction to dig further. The reviews in this book are complemented with over 200 authentic sources, which a researcher read for a detailed and deeper dive and set the direction for further exploration. This book would also act as an essential reference for training & learning professionals and instructional designers to design research-based training curriculum to develop the skills of their staff. Chapter 1 of the book elaborates on how the processes of learning, skill acquisition, and expertise development are interwoven. Chapter 2 presents a classification system to categorize various models reviewed in the literature under five groups. Chapter 3 describes twelve models of skill and expertise acquisition which are represented in the form of stages used frequently in learning, training, and performance literature. The chapter also briefly discusses each model's implications toward developing the skills and expertise of a less proficient individual to a higher level of proficiency. Chapter 4 reviews practice-, time- or task-based models, which are theories or models suggesting that acquisition of knowledge & skills, development of expertise, and performance improvement is a function of nature of the practice, amount of time spent on the task and task type. Chapter 5 presents the factor-based models, suggesting the interplay of several factors that influence the acquisition of knowledge & skills, development of expertise, and performance improvement. Chapter 6 embarks on describing expert modeling-based models, suggesting modeling an expert through elicitation or guidance for the acquisition of knowledge & skills, development of expertise, and performance improvement. Chapter 7 covers some newer movements toward cognition-based models, which are theories or models focusing on mechanisms of cognitive learning for the acquisition of knowledge & skills, development of expertise, and performance improvement. Chapter 8 concludes the book by integrating views from various thought leaders to explain a famous staged skill acquisition model.

This book deals with solving a pressing organizational challenge of bringing employees up to speed faster. In the fast-paced business world, organizations need faster readiness of employees to handle the complex responsibilities of their jobs. The author conducted an extensive doctoral research study with 85 global experts across 66 project cases to explore the practices and strategies that were proven to reduce time to proficiency of employees in a range of organizations worldwide. This book provides the readers with a first-hand account of findings exclusively related to training and learning strategies, instructional methods, and curriculum design. This book delivers over 21 training and learning strategies across online learning, classroom instructions, and on-the-job learning. These strategies will allow training designers and learning specialists to design workplace training programs that hold the potential to shorten time to proficiency of employees. The book not only describes findings of the study and theoretical underpinnings, but it also provides practical guidance for implementation to equip corporate learning specialists, HR professionals, training leaders, performance consultants, and direct managers. Chapter 1 of the book introduces the research study that was conducted and describes the sampling, participants, data collection and data analysis methodology. Chapter 2 introduces the concept and definition of accelerated proficiency and metrics such as time to proficiency and speed to proficiency. The chapter sets the premise for the business need that demands learning designers to explore methods to shorten time to proficiency of employees. Chapter 3 describes the result of proficiency curve analysis that revealed four possible trajectories to accelerate employee proficiency. Chapter 4 introduces the four key hurdles in the form of the inefficiencies of traditional training models that hamper the acceleration of proficiency. This chapter sets the stage what needs to be avoided when designing training meant to accelerate proficiency. Chapter 5 addresses the group of findings related to online or e-learning. A conceptual model is presented to describe five e-learning strategies with the great potential to accelerate proficiency in workplace skills. Chapter 6 focuses on findings grouped as the formal classroom or instructor-led instructional strategies. The chapter specifies five instructional strategies to design classroom training and deliver an enriched learning experience to put learners on an accelerated proficiency path. Chapter 7 explains the findings grouped as on-the-job learning or workplace learning strategies. The chapter describes three strategies for workplace learning design to leverage workplace opportunities and interventions which reported great potential to accelerate proficiency. The chapter presents a conceptual model of workplace learning strategies to guide the implementation of these strategies. Chapter 8 consolidate the strategies for online learning, classroom learning and workplace learning into a simple model for training design that holds the potential to create training that can contribute into shortening time to proficiency of the employees. Chapter 9 concludes the book with final thoughts on the role of training and learning strategies toward accelerating proficiency in the long run.

Taking up a doctorate sets you apart from the rest. If you are at a turning-point stage in your corporate or management career, where you are actively thinking of attaining the highest level of educational degree to create that extra edge in your career, then this book is for you. In this book, Dr. Raman K Attri shares his personal experience through his 2 doctorates. Dr. Raman will guide you through how to plan for this daunting path effortlessly. This book will provide you with key strategies to address behind-the-scenes challenges and complete your doctorate with reasonably less efforts. Through several reflective questions embedded in the book, you will be able to assess if taking up a doctorate path is the right decision for you. In this book, you will be able to identify the skills, competencies, and expertise required to undertake successful doctorate research, leverage your current and previous practice-based experience and translate that into doctorate research.