Most Training is Useless
“It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes a pearl, not pearl making seminars with other oysters.”
-Stephen King
“Businesses often use training as a surrogate for the hard work of true skill development.”
-Bill Peper, facilitator within General Motors’ Standards for Excellence process
“Training is too often used as an inexpensive way to look like you’re doing something if you’re a manager. As typically done, it requires little time and little personal change.”
-Ted Harro
As we learned earlier, the most effective approach to learning new skills as individuals is to apply deliberate practice to training and develop grit to set, reach, and reset our goals to get better as we go along in our careers. By studying the Dunning-Kruger Effect, we have learned to be more self-aware of our inclination to assume that we know more than we do and continuously challenge our understanding of the world. In the last section, we learned that intelligence is not fixed, and growth has no limit to what can be mastered or achieved.
In all, it’s fair to say that much of this chapter has been about independent study. Yes, we can improve ourselves and encourage others to learn on their own time, but what about organized group education? How’s that going along?
And, of course, here is where we come upon another paradox. When learning involves more than an individual effort and takes place in a corporate setting, we take something fulfilling and valuable, squeeze the life out of it, and transform it into this unholy abomination we recognize as training.
When most people hear the word training today, the blood runs out of their faces, and their body slumps as if the life has just been sucker-punched. Training connotes an experience that is a painful, time-consuming, and utterly useless exercise by most accounts, pretending to take employee development seriously. As soon as more than one person is added to an educational exercise, all the rules and best practices go right out the window. Not only is most training in today’s companies ineffective, but the purpose, timing, and content of training are flawed by design.
We’ve all been through the gamut of training workshops, online courses, and lectures that give training a bad name. Most training has turned into a box-checking exercise rather than a genuine development activity. Only a tiny fraction of formal training is ever put into practice, and as a result, most of the business training is a waste of money and time for everyone involved. Because most training, courses, and conferences are organized as stand-alone events, they are deemed irrelevant because they are disconnected from the work done and the problems at hand.
While we attend the sessions as a prerequisite to keeping our jobs, many of us have developed our own tips and tricks to get through the sessions as quickly as possible. We’ll patiently listen and half-tune out the instructors, then go through the motions to complete the courses and guess our way through any sort of assessment at the end. Once we see a window of opportunity to escape, we’ll quickly run back to our offices so that we can finally get back to doing our jobs.
Year after year, it’s the same charade that we torture ourselves and the other people we work with. Frustrating and ineffective puts the situation lightly.
More than anecdotal evidence or perceptions, there’s a great HBR article titled, “Where Companies Go Wrong with Learning and Development,” which brings to light the hard evidence of the training plight:
- “75% of 1,500 managers surveyed from across 50 organizations were dissatisfied with their company’s Learning & Development (L&D) function;
- 70% of employees report that they don’t have mastery of the skills needed to do their jobs;
- Only 12% of employees apply new skills learned in L&D programs to their jobs; and
- Only 25% of respondents to a recent McKinsey survey believe that training measurably improved performance. “ 63
The source of the training problem has been cited on all sorts of issues, whether lack of managerial clarity, uninterested learners, or outdated training practices.
Suppose you’ve had experience attending corporate training. In that case, you will have noticed that most training is designed from a top-down hierarchy and is initiated by someone at the executive or director level who thinks: “The people need these skills, and we’ll hire someone to teach it to them.” The people who come in to do the training are so detached from the organization that they don’t know how to connect the message to the organization’s priorities or the work done each day. Or if the course is video-based, the training is so generic that the message tries to reach everyone, but in doing so, reaches no one.
Rarely (or just about never) has someone come back from a three-hour marathon workshop and immediately applied what they have just half-listened to. When employees don’t use the skills they’ve learned after training, knowledge decay sets in quickly.
To illustrate this point, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus pioneered experimental studies of memory in the late 19th Century, culminating with his discovery of “The Forgetting Curve.” He found that if new information isn’t applied, we’ll forget about 75% of it after just six days. New skills must be practiced and applied. 63
If we were to step back, reflect, and think about the skills that we have learned throughout our lives and careers, we would find that the most impactful learning occurs when facing an immediate and pressing problem. An obstacle that halts progress causes us to apply all of our focus and energy to conduct our research, test the idea, and then apply it.
The root cause of this core problem with training — that training is rarely applied — comes from the fact that training is designed and dictated by people other than those who do the work.
Like most other practices, the best training is most helpful when it comes from a decentralized process. Decentralization strikes again. When one person comes across an idea, a tool, or technology that helps them do their job with more significant results in less time, they should be so excited that they can’t wait to share that information with others.
Even though someone may not be a professional trainer, what matters is what is being shared and whether or not it can be applied to real business problems. Training done by an organization’s people results in much higher acceptance and application rates. As Bossidy commented in execution, “80% of learning should take place outside the classroom. Every leader and supervisor needs to be a teacher; classroom learning should be about giving them the tools they need.” 3
To maximize the training’s effectiveness, the training should be conducted by the teams and groups that work together regularly so that the training can be action- and decision-oriented and collective commitments can be established. If the training applies to what the team is working on, then good ideas and practices that can be adapted later that day can be discussed in detail and then tested. A team member would share the information they discovered, the application and gauge interest to see if others would like to learn how they can solve similar problems they face. Then, training would occur — no fancy PowerPoints or speeches but real problems and real solutions in real-time.
When people understand and “own” the importance of a topic, they recognize the topic’s purpose, meaning, value, and role in their careers; thus, they often seek out and find resources. Any person who has found a good idea and has applied it to their work should be the trainer for others.
Rather than adding distractions to other people’s busy schedules, training should be structured and carried out in a way that helps others improve the quality or efficiency of what they are doing today. Training should be scheduled on topics that can be applied straightaway.
The key is to assess the effectiveness of training offered in your organization by asking the following questions:
- What behaviors need to change to convince people that new skills, abilities, and capabilities are required?
- Are the right people performing the training?
- How will the impact of the training be measured? Who will perform the follow-ups?
- What must happen before and after the training sessions occur to bring about change?
Today’s dynamic business environment calls for organizations and their people to adapt to changing circumstances and always be learning rapidly. Excellent training requires allowing people closest to the work to experience new ideas, discuss them, test them, and then implement them. With the proper preparation and follow-up, training can be compelling. And even better, decentralized training can be organized and executed in much less time and with much less cost than the traditional methodology.
Furthermore, as technology continues to grow and organizations face new challenges at a furious pace of change, we need to arm ourselves with the information necessary to adapt to our circumstances. What may have worked or used to work to solve a particular problem may no longer be applicable. We used to live with the issues because we could not find a solution that may now be solvable. As we learned in How Shit Gets done, there is no clear-cut recipe for overcoming obstacles. We need to commit to becoming the best versions of ourselves to set ourselves up for sustained success.
Without all this in mind, training will be (and usually is) a wasted opportunity.
Cover image credit: Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
Originally published at https://benjaminwann.com on May 9, 2021.
