Reducing the Training Burden: Making Yellow Belts with Green Belts

As 1 of 1 employees responsible for our local Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) program, expanding awareness of and involvement in the program can be a challenge. In fact, it is even a bit more challenging because 50% of my position is devoted to other project work.

Even providing training can be difficult. If I'm out of the office for several days to deliver training, then both the CPI program and my other job duties suffer.

We recently took advantage of the fact that the local cadre of Green Belts were eager to exercise their knowledge of lean six sigma principles to offer a Yellow Belt course. The standard Yellow Belt curriculum that we use is two full days of instruction and is led by a Black Belt. Our team team altered the training schedule so that the course could be offered in a three half-day format. I served as the Black Belt lead instructor, with three Green Belts sharing the instructional duties.

The re-worked schedule and the abundance of instructors worked wonderfully. The Green Belts took care of the lion's share of the lecture content. I sat in the back of the room and chimed in on difficult questions; I provided a lifeline if the Green Belt got stuck.

During the simulation portions of the curriculum, we broke up into small team. We had a Green Belt facilitator available for each team. I led the instruction/discussion during and after the simulation and the Green Belts led each team through a mini-simulated project.

Better still, the half-day format let everyone get back to work after lunch. Instead of work piling up at the office, both students and instructors were able to take care of urgent matters as the course proceeded.   

Student evaluations of the format were very supportive of the new format. Written comments suggested several minor tweaks.

The training burden, for both students and instructors, was greatly reduced by simple schedule changes and distributing the load among multiple instructors.

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