1989

When I moved from Yale to Northwestern (in 1989) to create the Institute for the Learning Sciences, I began to seriously consider the problems of corporate training. While at Yale I ran a company called Cognitive Systems that was building intelligent software, By the time I got to Northwestern I had been working on issues in the corporate world for about 10 years, so I was not the typical academic who knows nothing about how the business world operates. Nevertheless I was shocked by what I saw. I was brought to Northwestern by Andersen Consulting and immediately began to look at what they were doing in training. Here were the major issues I saw there:

• Large Classrooms (at their St. Charles training center) in which many students were fast asleep or trying to fake interest.
  
• A set of books called Green Books (referred to as FGBs) that were required reading that nobody read.
  
• A set of courses on the computer (called computer based training, or CBTs in those days) that were so deadly dull that Andersen people avoided them at all costs.
  
• Courses that were delivered before or after the time that people really needed them.
  
• Training that was endured rather than enjoyed whose main point was to allow people to hang out together, the training itself being understood to be, for the most part quite useless.

Here is a picture of trainees at St. Charles.

2008

Today the situation, in most companies is more or less the same as it was in 1989. There is a lot more CBT (now called online training) but not a lot more understanding that training is the highest priority a company has and that learning really only occurs on the job. So, if that is the case -- why do training?

The answer is that training should only be about making sure that situations where learning on the job is disastrous are handled by training. Trying to teach people to do their job with a few hours of training is really an absurd idea. People learn by doing, from experience, and from failure.

All training has to involve real experiences, failure, teaching at the failure points. And practice. Everything else is a mockery of a sham.

Go to the Socratic Arts web site to see what my current company is doing in training.

Online or not online is not the point; here is a paper that explains why.

The International Organization for Standardization built a powerpoint describing what we built for them.

At least I helped change Accenture's training into this: