TJ - The Publication for Learning and Development

Martyn Sloman

By Martyn Sloman (May 2008 Issue)
0 Comments Comments
Article Rating:

Poor Best

Email to a friend | Print Version

I was at Paddington Station recently to collect my mother from the Cardiff train. The train, as ever, was running late, so I went to the Costa Coffee bar on platform one.

There were two other people in my area of the coffee bar: a middle-aged man and a young woman, and it became obvious that he was interviewing her for a sales job in IT. Since
the venue was entirely inappropriate, I assumed that his interview questioning would be poor. This was not the case; he was, in fact, very polished.

However, he finished by asking her whether she had any questions. She responded by saying: “What about training and career progression and that sort of thing?” The interviewer then made a right mess of it by saying: “I’m very much in favour myself. We had a training manager who did courses but he is leaving to do a PhD. He’s not being replaced, as our chief executive says we don’t have the resources. However, I’m very much in favour. Some people in the company do external qualifications, I believe. Do you want training?”

This clearly does not qualify as ‘selling the job to the candidate’ and caused me to think what the ‘right’ answer would be under these circumstances. How about the following?

“We place great emphasis on personal development through the advancement of knowledge and skills. Capable and motivated people are the basis on which we can offer higher-value products to our customers. We are committed to supporting you in your personal development. We have moved away from the old-fashioned idea of sheep-dip training where people are put through training events irrespective of their prior experience, interest, motivation or the relevance of the event to their jobs and our needs.

“One consequence of this approach is that we are putting great efforts into developing what can be described as a coaching capacity. We expect all our staff, but particularly our managers, to have the skills to encourage others to learn through supportive feedback. We are keen on knowledge-sharing and recognise and reward those who are good at it.

“In this way, individual learning and team learning become part of normal day-to-day work rather than a set of isolated events. However, part of the deal must be that you must accept personal responsibility for your own learning, take advantage of opportunities and share your knowledge with others.”

This seems to me to capture the shift from training to learning. There is one illustration that I use in all my talks and lectures to demonstrate that shift. It concerns our cat Poppy.

Fifteen years ago we extended our family with the addition of a cat. My wife comes from rural Norfolk, in the east of England, and the cat was born in her home village of Little Snoring. The cat, then a tiny kitten, had lived in a barn; faced with a cat flap in a terraced house in London, she did not know what to do. She looked quizzically at me, my wife and my sons.

After an interval, my son said: “Okay Dad, what are you going to do now? Are you going to bring back a flipchart from work and draw a diagram? Are you going to go through the flap yourself to demonstrate? Or are you going to borrow the firm’s video camera, push the cat through the flap, play the recording and ask the cat what three things it could have done better?”

Nothing it seems to me better captured the trainer mindset at the time. We could design and deliver effective training in classroom situations. We could deploy a range of alternatives.
We were committed, positive, helpful and innovative, but we were often a bit peripheral. Our basic models were trainer-centred rather than learner-centred. We concentrated on
what we could deliver rather than what the learner might need.

This has proved to be a very popular story. Indeed, in 2007, Poppy received a Conference Excellence Award at the ITEC defence training simulation event. I often get e-mails asking how she is. However, at the turn of the year, at the ripe old age of 16, Poppy died in her native Norfolk. She will be missed but will live on in the training room.

Martyn Sloman is CIPD adviser in learning, training and development. From 1997-2000 he worked as director of management education and training for Ernst & Young. He is a visiting professor at Glasgow Caledonian and Kingston Universities. He can be contacted at m.sloman@cipd.co.uk

We have only displayed above the opening paragraph of this article. If you are a TJ subscriber, login now so you can download a PDF of this article in full, free of charge. For non-subscribers the PDF can be purchased for £9.00 see the "Buy Now" Option above.

Click here for a free 30 day trial to Training Journal

Back to top | Current TJ

 

Readers Comment

Comment on this story here >

Be the first to comment on this news story