Regardless of how much time you spend in training classes, you know that you really learn your job while doing your job. Success comes from turning that experience into life-long skills.
Pract.us puts the spotlight on this informal, everyday learning. We want to help you and your employees use on-the-job experience to super-charge your professional development.
Where Pract.us started
You may think you see ships. But what you really see is an effective on-the-job training program in action!
Our motivation to build Pract.us grew out of the training program used by the U.S. Navy. The Navy employs a combination of classroom and structured on-the-job training. They train constantly on the job, learning from practical experience working under pressure. And it’s inherently social: Experienced personnel help newer ones gain the skills they need to support the organization’s goals and advance their own careers.
The Navy’s method is so effective, they routinely teach new high school and college graduates to safely run shipboard nuclear reactors in just one year. (Yeah, that’s nuclear power.)
Even though the Navy’s hands-on program works well, most civilian businesses do very little organized or structured on-the-job training. They might provide some classes or videos, but employees tend to learn their jobs by asking questions, watching others, hunting down resources and practicing. On their own, they eventually learn how to do the job, but it can be confusing, frustrating and inefficient. And to make matters worse, this entire process is mostly invisible to management.
Learning and teaching are a part of every day in the Navy.
So why doesn’t the business world manage on-the-job training better? Well, as we’ve learned from running several teams over the past 20 years, it’s incredibly time-consuming and tedious to keep track of what everyone is learning, who’s teaching them, how well they got it and the progress they’re making towards their goals. Managing on-the-job training is a big administrative burden.
So we created Pract.us to help managers make everyday on-the-job experience your most powerful and accountable training method. We want Pract.us to help your employees learn from each other in a way that’s as effective as the Navy’s method but ridiculously easy to set up, use and track.
Our Pract.us team is dedicated to helping you build a successful structured on-the-job training program. We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions and training stories (good and bad!).