Training is a Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez — A Very Old Man with Enormous Wing

For a long time now I have been thinking about writing down my thoughts about the results of training courses for business, but the simple and direct post that Seth Godin published recently, saying that training pays, gave me all the motivation that I needed to sit down in front of my computer and write about it.

Yes, I agree with a few points he wrote, and yes, I think that training events will still present in our industry for some years. However, I think that it’s very important to reflect on some of the points that I’m exposing below, especially if you’re living in 2016 and not in 1945.

Is training as important for the business as we think it is?

As a former owner of two training companies, and as an almost-former trainer, I have been a little concerned, especially over the last 5 years, about the worth of training events for my clients. Not exactly because the subject was not relevant or because our trainers were not good, in fact our clients used to say that both were great, it was much more about the concept of training itself, which is even more worrying.

Just to make it crystal clear: by training, I mean a set of prescribed and structured activities focused on getting people to consistently reproduce behaviours (something a person does that involves an action) without variation, but with increasingly greater efficiency even if conditions around change.

My first step in trying to alleviate the discomfort I had was by doing some research into this subject. One important bit of data came from Charles Jennings, a leader thinker and practitioner in L&D, that points out that, only an average of 10% of what people need to know to improve their work performance comes from formal events, such as training courses. Well, it would not be a problem if companies were investing only that amount on prescriptive or formal learning, but they are not. Talking to several L&D departments from different countries, I collected some informal information that says that an average of 60% of their budget for 2015 was set aside for prescriptive learning initiatives. Too bad.

So my conclusion here is that the investment that most companies are making in training courses is not in tune with the value this kind of service could provide to the business.

What is the ROI (Return on Investment) of a training course?

My following step was to create a better understanding of the reason that motivates a company to employ training services. Basically what I found out was that most companies that invest in training services are expecting as a result, a better performance from their employees. But, unfortunately, our experience — and research — shows that it’s not happening, as Harold D. Stolovitch and Erica J. Keeps point out in the figure below:

That’s why comments like “They went through all that training but they still don’t seem to be able to do it. They need more or better training” or “I don’t understand. They passed the certification tests and still can’t get the jobs done. You had better give them advanced training” are very common.

Yes, we can present several reasons to justify why most people are not practicing what they learn in training when they come back to the real world, it was what Naresh Sen did in the recent post "5 reasons to not to train", but if you’ve studied system thinking just a little bit, the answer to this question is not that complicated:

Environmental/cultural factors are more relevant to the performance of a system than anything else, even than the knowledge that people have acquired.

So my conclusion on this topic is that for most companies the ROI of training investment is quite compelling.

How do you feel delivering waste?

Having my background in software development, on many occasions during the last decade I heard people say that most features we deliver to our clients are not or rarely used by end-users. Yes, I really believe that it happens in tons of projects in several fields.

Back in 2012, I was training a group in agile methods for software development and then I presented some data of usage of features to the group, and suddenly one thought popped into my head: how much of the program that a trainer presents in a classroom is really useful for the participants of the course?

Well, at least for that training course I looked for an answer. After sending messages to 10 groups during a period of 6 month asking two questions (on information retention and practice), I realised that only 23% of that program was valuable in someway to the work of those groups. And, hey…most of them loved the courses and gave me a beautiful NPS score!

My conclusion on this topic is that even on a training course that pleases the attendees, the amount of waste delivered is really quite big.

Working as a team, but learning as individuals…is it make some sense?

Companies positioned in the creative economy are now realising that their smaller piece capable of delivering some value for the business is not a person, but a team. That’s why the smart ones are stopping to think about the worker performance, and starting to improve their team’s performance.

For those companies, it is pretty clear that in order to learn “judgmental tasks”, those ones that depends on somebody’s opinion, a learning process focusing in collective learning works better. However, a revealing experiment conducted by Patrick Laughlin, a social psychologist at the University of Illinois, showed that even for problem-resolution of “intellective tasks”, the ones that have a single correct answer, groups of three to five people perform better than the average individual, and they also did better than the best individual expert.

Ouch! One more sore point for training courses as their primary role is individual learning. The trainer needs to focus on transferring knowledge to individuals, they’re not focusing on the team dynamic and even less on collective learning.

My conclusion here is that if you need your people working as a team you shouldn't ask them to learn as individuals.

What the younger age groups think about training courses?

Yes, companies still invest a lot of their L&D budget in prescriptive learning initiatives, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post. But when we talk specifically about off-the-job courses, fortunately for some and devastating to others, the numbers start tumbling, as pointed out in a recent Resolution Foundation report.

The decline in off-the-job training has been most dramatic for younger age groups, which is evidenced by what we can find when visiting companies in the creative economy and talking to workers from those age groups. I did it while writing my book and the results were not a surprise: 85% of that workers answered that there are better ways to improve their performance than by attending training courses. Moreover, 69% said that if training is needed, they prefer on-the-job courses facilitated by local workers (who know their real world) than off-the-job courses provided by outside experts (who always talk generally).

My conclusion on this point is that the big change in learning investments is probably going to happen as a bottom-up movement. The younger age groups seem to be more in tune with the complexity of learning in this century than L&D departments. It seems that more and more the reply to the offer “Hey, we have a budget to invest in off-the-job training for you guys!” will become “No, thank you!”

If not training, then what?

In the introductory part of my book “How Creative Workers Learn” I highlight the controversy practiced by modern thinkers who point to complexity as the main argument for the practice of their ideas, but then just ignore the same complexity when delivering learning events.

In a complex environment, it’s probably impossible to deal with learning through prescriptive events, such as training courses. It would be a great strategy only for simple environments where the development of good and best practices are possible.

So, training is almost gone, in fact, data shows that we’re leaving it, it’s not that useful anymore. But, then what now? Well, there are a lot of movements all over the world experimenting with frameworks and learning systems more in line with the level of complexity of the modern age. I’m part of one of these movements: Learning 3.0.

In short, Learning 3.0 proposes a more collaborative system for learning, where questions and answers are built by those who learn.

We think that prescriptive learning is a very important part of our history, maybe still valuable for learning the basics of a new subject, but very inefficient to lead with the challenges that creative workers are used to facing in the modern world of work. Now, we need emergent learning!

You can visit our website to get more information, or better, you can read the first Learning 3.0 book that is receiving comments like these below:

“Reading Learning 3.0 was like a million light bulbs coming on at once. This book answers the biggest challenge facing my business and all businesses in the knowledge economy.” Jack Hubbard, CEO of Propellernet

“In this thought provoking and insightful book, Alexandre puts forward a new model of learning fit for the 21st century — one that is more emergent and ultimately effective. Embrace Learning 3.0 and play your part in the learning revolution that’s already underway.” Laurence McCahill, Co-founder of The Happy Startup School

But if you cannot wait to feel and see how to put it in practice, I invite you to visit one of our upcoming Learning 3.0 Camp. No, it’s not training, far from it…it’s a real experience of emergent learning.

See you there!

About the title: Yes, I was tempted to label this post as “The 05 reason why training is -almost- dead”, but I wanted to be more introspective. So, the title I choose is a provocative reflection about our relationship with training courses relating it with the relationship between society and the supposed old angel of the short story “a Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.