The problem with training

The problem with training is that it doesn’t usually work. This may sound unlikely, in the face of overwhelming evidence that people continue to attend a multitude of training programmes over the course of their careers. Why would organizations that, in normal circumstances, have both eyes on the profit margin spend thousands of pounds, year after year, on something that doesn’t add value to the organization?

Training, managed properly, can work very well indeed. However, if all the manager does is sign up a member of staff on a course, allow for them being away for the day or days required and then expect to get them back complete with a new set of skills that they can instantly put into practice – they are bound to be disappointed.

Training is not some sort of magic spell cast over the trainees in the training room. What happens there is the tip of the iceberg. If the trainee is not clear about why they are there, then there is bound to be some sort of confusion, no matter how good the trainer is.

Ask most trainers and they will confirm that most trainees respond to the question ‘Why are you here?’ with one of the following:

• ’My name was on the list.’
• ’My boss sent me.’
• ’My boss said I had to improve my..... skills.’
• ’At appraisal we agreed my.....skills needed to get better.’
• ’I want to be better at.....’
• ’Someone told me this was a good course.’
• ’I don’t know.’

The first two and the last two indicate that the trainee has no real focus. But what about those in the middle of the list – don’t they imply that there is a reason for training?

Perhaps they do – but they don’t tell the trainer or the trainee precisely what the outcome should be. In order to improve, we need to know how good we are now. In other words, what is the current skill level – and what does the trainee want it to be when the training has been completed?

This may seem very obvious to you, but even when people are enlightened as to what a learning objective is, they seem to have great difficulty writing one down in specific and measurable terms. If trainees turn up without clear objectives, the trainer can include the exercise of developing objectives at the beginning of the programme, but this takes time.

In the next chapter we’ll be looking at what we can do to avoid this situation.