Why Most Corporate Training Is Ineffective—and What To Do About It
An article in Harvard Business Review explains why corporate training falls flat:
It often is irrelevant to what the learner is doing at that point in time in their work.
It is not immediately used, and so it immediately gets forgotten.
Also, corporate training is often dumbed down. A common expectation is that the learner will take away two or three things. But if you remember your college days, you were expected to take away everything. Imagine how little you would have learned in college if you were only expected to remember a few things from each course!
The keys to effective learning are:
The learner must be motivated.
The learner must use the material immediately.
The learner must be rigorously tested.
The learner must continue to use the material for some time after the course has completed.
In college, motivation to learn mainly comes from fear: the fear that one will not do well on a test. This is not a positive motivator, but it works. Still, it would be better if we could offer a carrot with the stick of a test. For example, if the material is very relevant to one’s current work tasks, then one is motivated by a desire to do well in one’s work.
People have professional pride. Pride in one’s work is one of the positive motivators identified by Daniel Pink: he called it “mastery”. So while having tests is important, even better is making sure that the learning material is provided contemporaneously with one’s need for that material in one’s job.
If one immediately uses the material on one’s job, then the material will be made concrete in the form of memories of real experiences. However, it is often better to simulate something before doing it for real, just as many of us had simulated driving when learning to drive, before going out on the actual road. So good training should include simulation, or homework projects to reinforce the ideas in a concrete way. For example, Agile 2 Academy’s Multi-Team DevOps training includes projects that simulate real world multi-team situations—something that most DevOps courses from other sources fail to do.
Testing is important. Learning without testing is unvalidated learning. Would you trust a physician who had not been tested at all? Or a pilot? Or an engineer who has designed something that you use and depend on?
People need to know that the testing is rigorous. If they know that ahead of time, they will take notes and study. If it is not rigorous, they will pay half attention during the training, and will absorb little. No one wants to fail a test and have their employer see the results. That’s why all of Agile 2 Academy’s courses include rigorous testing.
Importantly, one must continue to use the new learnings after the training has completed. Otherwise the brain will assign a low priority to those new mental pathways and they will be quickly reclaimed. That’s why it is crucial to learn things when you actually need them; or, if you learn them ahead of time, have a way to keep the learning current, through continual learning projects that build on what you have learned so far. Learning is a journey—not a destination.
Conclusion
Continuous learning is crucial today. Organizations cannot find all of the talent that they need, so they must create the talent, by training people and giving them experience in what they have learned. That is the only effective way to fill the pipeline with enough talent so that the organization will not be talent-constrained.
But learning must be effective. If you train people but they retain little, you might as well not train them at all.
