Robotics skills are increasingly valuable, so your team is likely to see the advantage of robotics training for their professional development. Individual Learning Plans are a great way to highlight this value to the whole team and align your business goals with employees’ personal goals.
Bridge Perspectives with Learning Plans
An Individual Learning Plan (aka Individual Development Plan, Personal Development Plan, Training Log, etc.) is a document to log ongoing learning. At its most basic, it provides a record of training received. However, it is most useful when it prompts the trainee to reflect on what they learned and consider it within the larger scope of their ongoing professional development.
Your business’s robotics goals probably involve operational performance indicators, such as throughput, order fulfillment, product quality, etc. Your employees’ goals are likely to be related to their ambitions, such as learning new skills, assuming more responsibility, or increasing their chances of promotion. The scope of these goals is quite different, but the Learning Plan can act as a bridge between them.
Learning Plans are most effective when you make them a key part of your in-house robotics training program. Instead of just distributing Learning Plans and expecting trainees to fill them out, work together with your team to align your business goals with their personal goals.
A Simple Way to Create Effective Training Programs
Here at Robotiq, we want to make it as easy as possible for you to start training your own team of in-house robotics experts.
That’s why we’ve created a series of eBooks to help you out. We’ve taken key business skills and applied them to robotics.
The result is a clear, straightforward process you can apply to your own business right away.
Together these eBooks guide you through the whole process of developing a robotics team, from assessing your business needs, to implementing your training program, to measuring the effectiveness of the program.
Related: Experimental Evaluation of Mixed Precision Training for End-to-End Applications
1. Design your Learning Program
If you haven’t already, you should definitely check out our in-house robotics expertise modules. They guide you step-by-step through the whole process of implementing a successful robotics training program, starting with why you need in-house robotics expertise, and then covering how to assess the robotics needs of your business, how to get the team on board, and how to build an effective training program.
2. Introduce Individual Learning Plans
Module 7 is an Individual Learning Plan that you can distribute directly to your team members.
It builds on the work you’ve done in previous modules, so get the most out of it, you should already have gained your key stakeholders’ support and begun designing your robotics training plan.
The Learning Plan guides trainees through the process of:
- Rating their starting level of robotics expertise based on key robotics skills, such as programming, critical thinking, and control system analysis.
- Identifying their own learning goals and how these relate to robotics knowledge.
- Reflecting on the training they’ve received. This helps solidify their learning, and you can use this information to improve future training sessions.
- Identifying specific ideas for improving the business’s robotic processes.
- Reflecting on their overall robotics learning.
Ideally, your team should complete the Learning Plan in collaboration with other members of the team, such as key stakeholders. To be most effective, it should not be a case of filling out the form and then immediately forgetting about it. Instead, it should be a dynamic document that is updated regularly.
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