This post is provided by guest blogger, J. Mike Condreay, graduate student at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, MS in Training and Development program.

Madonna’s Material Girl song came to me when I read an article on training assessment for the millennial generation.  It is easy to simply replace the words material with millennial.  The question that remains is can the millennial process replace the materialistic needs of a fully functioning training program?

Christopher Hill (2012), writing for Faculty Focus, provides a study for how the millennial generation is impacting the training assessment of e-learning curriculum.  Using research provided by Julie Giuliani, the executive dean of Florida Community College Jacksonville (FCCJ), Hill notes that the nature of millennials has resulted in changes to the way that educators teach and assess learning.  Overall the article details how FCCJ has added networking aspects to its toolkit for evaluating the impact that training and education have had on the millennial students.  Training and Development professionals that find themselves catering to the millennial generation as Boomers and Gen-Xers depart the workforce will find these ideas useful. 

My reaction to the article was twofold.  On one hand working for the dinosaur training industry that is Nuclear Power, I am very interested in seeing how we can engage the newer generations of employees.  I was particularly drawn to the 3-2-1 concept, which is something that my daughter already uses in elementary school.  On the other hand, I am concerned about testing integrity.  As these new methods of training assessment come to light, how sure are we that cheating isn’t occurring on new technology platforms that haven’t been identified yet? 

References:

Hill, C. (2012, 2). Assessment for the Millennial Generation. Retrieved from Assessing Online learning; Strategies, Challenges, and Opportunities: https://www.facultyfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/AssessingOnlineLearning-OC.pdf