Training, Education, or Awareness?
While these three terms might seem similar, experts in instruction differentiate between them.
- Awareness refers to generating recognition of a topic’s relevance and importance.
- Education refers to comprehension of facts and principles.
- Training refers to a program that enables the learner to practice new skills.
Often, training requires awareness and education as a foundation on which to build. For example, a mental health agency might do all of the following:
- Make parents, teachers, and students aware that many young people are suicide risks;
- Educate parents, teachers, and students to recognize the signs that a young person may be a suicide risk;
- Train school counselors to support students at risk of suicide, including appropriate referral, reporting, and assistance for parents.
Examples of tools for promoting
awareness include social marketing campaigns, newsletter articles, posters, and ads. For more information on social marketing techniques related to training and behavioral health look at blogs from
SAMHSA’s Facebook page as well as SAMHSA’s new
BHTalk that posts links to 17 blogs ranging from trauma-informed practices to resources and support for group leaders
- Decide on the Priority Recruitment and Retention Focus (Job Position) Quick Tool - is a section in Building a Recruitment and Retention Plan chapter that helps you summarize your recruitment and retention data and use it to identify the most critical job position to the recruitment and retention challenge.
- Define the Problem – is a section in Building a Recruitment and Retention Plan chapter that helps you define the problem and make a decision about the focus of your recruitment or retention plan by walking you through a series of assignments.
- Assignment 2: Identify Needs – is a section in Building a Recruitment and Retention Plan chapter that helps you identify organizational needs by constructing a clear needs statement that can help frame the range of potential solutions and increase understanding of the repercussions for unmet or partially met needs.
- Needs, Issues and Concerns Worksheet – is a section in Building a Recruitment and Retention Plan chapter that helps you re-defined the problem statement so that the most relevant issues to your problem are identified.
- Assignment 3: Develop Objectives – is a section in Building a Recruitment and Retention Plan chapter that helps you develop specific and measurable objectives to meet identified needs and respond to the root cause of the problem, not the symptoms.
- Analyzing Tasks and Skills – is a section of Training Intervention Strategies that provides background and information that helps you decide what type of training development approach is needed and whether it is a relatively simple design or if it requires multiple collaborators to design.
- Adult Learning Resources – this resource provides links to about 10 books or reports that discuss Adult Learning Theory in detail.
Effective workforce training incorporates elements of both awareness and education but goes beyond them to enable staff to apply skills in a specific job environment. If you send your employees to an educational program that makes them
aware of the importance of providing
culturally competent services and
educated about the ways in which cultural differences might influence the effectiveness of the services they provide, you have provided the foundation for training—but not the training itself. Effective training helps staff actually apply what they have learned on the job—in other words, deliver services in a culturally competent manner. In order to ensure the benefits of training are actually transferred to your agency’s daily practice, you also need to
reinforce the training by encouraging, supporting, and rewarding employees for practicing these skills.