Understanding the 'how and why' of learning

The issue of simply training to meet a minimum legal requirement is something that needs to be addressed across the board if we are to recapture the customer’s attention.

The question “how does learning take place?” is one that has fascinated thoughtful people throughout the ages and, more recently, educational psychologists — and it is thanks
to the pioneering research of American educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom that we understand the concept of different ‘levels of learning’.

How learning takes place is a question that fascinates us here at CPL as well, because this understanding is the key to developing effective training.

As a sector, we have concentrated on the delivery of Level 2 training, and qualifications such as the APLH (Award for Personal Licence Holders), but we must move beyond that legal minimalist approach.

A difficult economic period has had huge implications for pubs and bars. Put simply, it represents the death of mediocrity. To tempt people into our premises we need to take a step back and look at the whole of the customer’s journey and experience. This means recognising that quality of staff is crucial to the customer experience. This, in turn, has implications not just for training, but for staff selection as well.

Selecting for talent

We need to put the selection of talent at the heart of staff recruitment. We might define a talent as “a recurring pattern of thoughts, feeling, or behaviour that can be productively applied”. The emphasis here is on the word “recurring”.

Your talents are the behaviours you find yourself doing often. For example, the instinctive ability of a bartender to remember names and faces of regulars and what they drink is a talent.

The key to excellent performance is finding the match between talent and job role. Selecting for talent means recognising that an ‘average’ member of staff can be trained to be ‘good’; a ‘good’ member of staff can be trained to be ‘great’, but a ‘below-average’ member of staff can only ever reach average! Training works best when it builds on talent.