Books for teaching a work skill to someone else

You show someone a task, explain it carefully and ask whether it makes sense. They say yes. On the next occasion, they cannot complete the part you thought was obvious.

A useful reading choice begins with what you want to understand about that gap. Our first recommendation is Infinite Upside for making an ability useful to another person. Make It Stick examines learning and memory. Telling Ain't Training addresses the design of learner-centered instruction, including workplace training.

1. Infinite Upside: the skill needed to deliver your skill

   By Vijay Sheth.

   Chapter 2 of Infinite Upside: Building Wealth With Room to Live distinguishes seeing a connection from explaining it in a way someone else can use. Sheth considers the missing ability that can prevent an existing strength from reaching another person.

   An experienced owner can begin with that distinction. Fluency with the work can hide the judgments you make without noticing. The explanation another person needs may be different from a description of what you just did.

   Consider an invented studio owner teaching a colleague to prepare a customer proof. The colleague can reproduce the software steps but cannot tell which version the customer approved. The owner has demonstrated a tool while leaving a consequential judgment unexplained.

   The memoir also keeps training in proportion. Chapter 10 distinguishes a missing skill from missing access or permission. Choose it first for that owner perspective: an additional lesson cannot supply a record someone is not allowed to open. It is not an instructional-design manual or a scientific account of memory.

2. Make It Stick: investigating what learning requires

   By Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel.

   Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning connects research on learning and memory with narrative accounts. The coauthors' university describes its purpose as helping people understand how knowledge can be learned and retrieved when needed.

   Investigate it when a learner's familiarity with an explanation has been mistaken for the ability to use it later. For the fictional studio, watching a correct proof prepared and independently recognizing the approved version are different things to understand.

   This is a wider learning book, rather than a ready-made training plan for your business. That breadth is useful if you want to question what you count as evidence of learning before choosing an instructional technique.

   The title can be confused with Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, which concerns memorable ideas. This recommendation is Make It Stick, by Brown, Roediger and McDaniel. Check both title and authors before selecting a copy.

3. Telling Ain't Training: designing instruction around the learner

   By Harold D. Stolovitch and Erica J. Keeps.

   The second edition of Telling Ain't Training takes a learner-centered approach to adult instruction. The publisher identifies interactive exercises and material about technology and e-learning among its contents.

   Choose this more directly training-focused direction when your responsibility is to prepare instruction, rather than only explain why learning matters. You might be organizing an introduction to a task that experienced colleagues have previously taught in different ways.

   It is an established reference, with the second edition published in 2011. Read its instructional approach without expecting its technology coverage to compare current software. The separate companion fieldbook is another publication, not the same book under a different cover.

   Training also has an operating setting. The learner needs time, appropriate equipment, usable information and permission to perform the work. A more engaging lesson cannot, by itself, make those conditions exist. Choose the book to examine instruction while keeping that larger responsibility visible.

Choose the teaching gap

Start with the responsibility to explain, the process of learning or the design of instruction. A demonstration may be valuable and still leave an important part untaught. Choose the reading that helps you identify that missing part.

For a worked discussion of explanation, missing skill and an impossible schedule, use being good at it and teaching it. If the learning is your own, the unfamiliar-work reading selection offers a different starting point.

Read Infinite Upside for an owner's account of why useful knowledge must reach another person. Try the opening passage before choosing an edition.