Donald J. Ford, Ph.D., Training and Human Resource Consultant Biography
Donald J. Ford, Ph.D. is a training and human resource consultant specializing in instructional design, human resource management and quality improvement. As President of Training Education Management LLC since 1997, he has consulted with clients like: ATD, ANSI, Amgen, Toyota, Nissan, Rockwell International, Samsung Electronics, Orange County Transportation Authority, Southern California Edison, Employers Group, Saudi ARAMCO, CompuCom, Central Bank of Egypt and Malaysian Institute of Training and Development. For these and other clients, he has developed custom classroom, structured on the job and web-based training on a wide variety of technical and professional topics, conducted performance and needs analyses, facilitated groups, managed quality improvement projects, taught train the trainer, HR and leadership courses and evaluated results.
Prior to 1997, he held training management positions at Southern California Gas Company, Magnavox, Allied-Signal and Texas Instruments. Dr. Ford holds a B.A. and M.A. in history and a Ph.D. in education, all from UCLA. He has taught graduate courses in Human Resource Development for USC, Antioch University Los Angeles and the University of Alabama. He has published 35 articles and four books on topics in training, education and management, including: Bottom-Line Training: Performance-based Results (2010). Dr. Ford has presented at the numerous international conferences. He has worked extensively overseas in Asia, Middle East and Latin America and speaks Spanish and Chinese Mandarin.
Interview with Don Ford, Training and Human Resource Consultant:
Article Type: Leading edge From: Development and Learning in Organizations, Volume 23, Issue 6
“Interview with Don Ford”, Development and Learning in Organizations, 2009, Vol. 23 No. 6.
https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2009.08123fab.001Donald J Ford PhD, CPT, President of Training Education Management is a Training and Human Resource Consultant specializing in instructional design and human resource management. He has over 20 years’ experience in the field of human resource development including training management positions at Southern California Gas Company, Magnavox, Allied Signal and Texas Instruments. In his current role he has consulted with numerous clients including ASTD, Toyota, Nissan, Rockwell International, Samsung Electronics and National Education Corp. He has published 35 articles and four books on topics in training, education and management.
Firstly, what attracted you to working in this field?
I started with a teaching credential in the world of public education and taught in middle school and high school for about five years. Today teachers are in short supply in the US, but back when I started there was the opposite problem and it was very difficult to get a full-time job. After failing to get tenure, I decided I should try something else which turned out to be training and development. The first job I got I did not even know that this field existed but a company called Texas Instruments had just released a new personal computer and were looking for people who could train users. I was hired and decided that I liked working with adults and of course I preferred the money in corporate training to public education! And the rest, as they say, is history.
Can you tell me about some of the projects you have been working on recently?
Most recently I have been designing a finance training course for executives in a manufacturing company based here in the US; the company is trying to increase the financial business acumen of their leaders and I have been asked to put together a series of courses on finance which we are just in the middle of piloting. Last year I completed a large project, involving an accreditation, for the Egyptian Banking Institute in Cairo. I worked on that for over two years to help them gain accreditation from an American body so that they could issue continuing education units to their participants. It was an interesting project, because it involved not only working on the training, but also quite extensively on the strategy, structure and even cultural issues of the organization.
Did the project involve quite strict guidelines?
Yes, a very strict set of standards and guideline requirements which had been created primarily for North American organizations so it was quite a stretch to adapt them for application in a middle-eastern context. We were successful, however and I have just heard that they achieved accredited status.
As Director of the Center for Workforce Development at Antioch University, you have worked across the fields of practice and research. How important is it that L&D practitioners make closer connections with academia to understand how research can be practically applied?
I think there is a great need for researchers and practitioners to get together to share information, but unfortunately it does not happen often enough. At Antioch we had non-degree business extension certificate programs that we marketed to the business community and also a traditional MBA program and we tried our best to foster crossover between those two functions, but we struggled to make it work and I think that fault lies on both sides of the divide. For example the academic researchers are sometimes dealing with issues that are so specialized that if you do not have an extensive background in that area you can not understand the implications of the research so academics sometimes get too deep into theory without paying attention to the practical application. However on the other side, practitioners are often failing to keep up with major research in the field, they do not read the journals, they do not attend the academic conferences and even when they do encounter some of the research they can not always fully grasp its significance. Therefore I think there is both a need for more focused kinds of practical research and a need for those of us that do this for a living every day to take time to learn and apply the latest thinking.
What are your thoughts about the opportunities that Web 2.0 tools offer in relation to the L&D function?
I think e-learning provides an opportunity to improve informal learning in organizations. Informal learning is something that we have always known is very powerful and that we learn a lot informally from our conversations and life experiences, but how do you capture or support that? That has always been a challenge but some of these new web tools like Wikis and social networking sites provide the opportunity for more informal learning to take place in organizations and potentially for it to be tracked and to make this tacit knowledge a little bit more explicit. I think there is great promise and that these opportunities support the traditional approach to formal learning which is more top-down and company and strategically-driven, the challenge now is to figure out how to put the two together and capture the best of both worlds.
In your opinion what are the biggest obstacles to effective learning and development in organizations?
The organizational barriers are numerous, but probably the biggest one is translating what people learn in formal classroom settings back to the job. Studies show that as much as 50 percent of what people learn in a classroom or formal training session is never used and therefore wasted. I would say that probably one of the biggest questions to answer is how do we more effectively transfer the skills to the workplace and support people in the workplace?
Currently, another major obstacle is simply the financing and investment in training, what I have seen over the years is that during boom times companies invest heavily in training and new people but during a recession there is a phase where training programs are slashed, people are made redundant and whatever momentum was gained in the learning and development field is then lost. Very often companies are then forced, once they emerge out of a recessionary period, to essentially go back to square one and begin again. I am seeing a little less of this approach in the current downturn and I am encouraged by the fact that although there have been a number of redundancies and cutbacks I have not seen as much of a wholesale slash and burn approach to training functions as in the past. Nevertheless there is a sense that you take one step forward during the boom times and are then forced to take two steps back and you begin to realize it is difficult to progress forward as a function. Therefore a big challenge with this recession is to see how much damage has been done to our field and how much effort it is going to take to get back to even just where we were prior to this happening.
And finally, which company or organization do you think is getting it right in terms of learning and development?
Microsoft would be one company that springs to mind, they have won numerous awards from training organizations, including a best award from ASTD recently. I am very impressed with the quality of people that work in their training function and also with the commitment they make to training. They have a very interesting decentralized model of training in which they are trying to make more use of e-learning and Web 2.0 tools and of course they are perfectly placed to do so since they are the creators of many of these tools. By decentralizing the training function and not forcing people to go through traditional curricula they push training and knowledge resources out into the workforce and therefore allow people to pick and choose what they need. I am also impressed by Toyota and their commitment to training and development, which they spend a lot of money on, but also the strategy they have developed to bring learning down to the individual employee level by providing every associate with their own development plan.
Be Sure to Check Out Training and Human Resource Consultant Donald J. Ford’s Podcast Series!