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By the time I moved to Northwestern from Yale in 1989, 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 the Andersen people avoided them at all costs.
- Courses that were delivered before or after the time that people really needed them.
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?
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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.
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All training has to involve real experiences, failure, teaching at the failure points. And practice. Everything else is a mockery of a sham.
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The simulation was by far the best professional training course I've ever participated in. It was relevant, simulated real-world pressures and events, and forced us to look at our interactions with people from a professional and strategic standpoint. I've never had a training course from which I've learned so much about the job, and about myself as a professional. 
A recently promoted new manager for a F100 Financial Services firm
on a course developed by Socratic Arts.
October, 2009
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Those awful programmed learning workbook training manuals that everyone hated? Put them online with some cute graphics and presto: e-learning. Yippee!!
Read Splendid Learning by Roger Schank |
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Today, I find myself irritated by the corporate training world which, of course, misperceives education in exactly the same ways as the school reformers do.
Read my blog, Education Outrage |
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