Going on a training course is an experience most people look forward to. If it is a pleasant environment and the trainer is skilled in making the event interesting and fun, it will be enjoyable too. A course is often seen as a reward. People in developing countries, for example, love to go to events abroad, where the actual course may be incidental to other perceived benefits such as shopping opportunities and experiencing a different world to their own. Courses are relatively easy to manage – the attendees blocking off a period of time, and the trainer professionally designing and improving the event and the materials that go with it. Helped by a multitude of aids, such as those provided by Fenman and to be found in Training Journal, creating a good experience for delegates is not so hard to achieve after the pilot run.

As we well know, achieving real learning is another matter all together – that is, if we define learning as a lasting change in capability that will be applied in the workplace. Attendees may arrive physically at the same time, but mentally be in quite different places. They come with different motivations to learn. Many a trainer has had people who have been ‘sent’ to a course for reasons as bizarre as ‘My manager had to use up his training budget and I was available’! Others are there because it is ‘mandatory’ – for compliance with a regulation or a policy – or because ‘it looked interesting’.

Perhaps some part of the course description caught the eye of the person or his/her manager but on studying the details they realised they had made a wrong choice. I will never forget a former boss of mine, who was difficult to argue with, insisting that the ‘top team’ would go on the John Ridgeway outdoors training event in the north of Scotland, as the brochure featured his yacht called Gypsy Rose and he believed we would spend a week on this becoming a great team. The reality proved very different!

Second, people come with different learning objectives. For some it may be critical to their job; for others it may be incidental or ‘nice to know’. The objectives of the course may be neatly laid out and professionally defined in terms of end results, but this is no guarantee that these end results will be relevant to each and every delegate. Then people have different learning styles. For some, Action Learning is the only thing that works for them; others enjoy the framing of theory and models. The more diverse the delegates are in terms of background, cultures and jobs, the more varied all these factors are likely to be. So our happy sheets are important feedback on the running of the event and the experience, but little guide to learning.

We may ask, then, why do courses continue to be so popular? This question reminds me of a challenge I gave to one CEO I worked for (not the same person mentioned earlier) on the subject of managing by headcount. I went through all the reasons why this was a dysfunctional way to manage human resources. When I had finished he looked at me and said: ‘I know all that, but it’s simple and everyone understands it.’

It seems to me that it is the same with training. However much we try and give alternative development options, competency by competency, the simple option all round is to choose training courses. It’s the least effort. People like things that are neatly packaged and have a beginning and an end. Both the manager and the employee will feel positive about the tick in the box that results.

I once thought the solution was not to make available a list of training courses. I quickly realised that I had seriously upset the expectations of all parties, especially as the right courses for the right people will always be a valuable component of learning. It is the word ‘component’ that is probably the key. If we care about real learning being achieved and the learning cycle being completed, we need several components of what we might call a learning process. The challenge is to package such learning processes in a way that is as appealing as the simple course event.

Take as an example ‘becoming an effective change manager’. The first component here might be some personal reflection on experiences of change, followed by a structured set of either one-to-one or group discussions with people who have managed change themselves. The resulting analysis might form the pre-work for a facilitated face-to-face event with other learners, previously known as ‘the course’. Here they may be able to synthesise together the lessons of effective change management, as well as study some theories, models and research findings. The next stage would be to apply the learning achieved thus far to a real case in their own workplace, with access to a coach or tutor. The component mix may vary depending on the learning style of the individual.

I hope many readers will say, ‘But this is what I normally do.’ I’d love to hear of examples, especially where a set of ‘learning processes’ has significantly replaced a list of training ‘courses’.

Andrew Mayo is a consultant, speaker, writer and facilitator in international HR management, with specialisms in people and organisation development. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1727 843424, at andrew@mliltd.com or visit www.mliltd.com

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