The Evolution of Training by Andrew Vermes, Training Journal, October 2011

This is a thoughtful article by a senior consultant at Kepner Tregoe, one of the few international names in management training that has survived over time. It starts well, makes some insightful observations but fades towards the end, leaving the reader unsure about the points the author is trying to make.

He starts by arguing that, for all the many developments in technology over the last thirty years, not much in management training has changed. The blackboard or overhead projector may have been replaced by PowerPoint and there may be e-learning rather than books as pre-reading but the fundamentals are much the same. The main reason is that the capacity of the human mind has not changed so there are limits to how far you can speed up the learning process and achieve economies of scale.

Another factor is that there are few big players in the training market, apart from specialist areas like IT Training, and this has become even more so as the desire for tailored programmes has gathered pace. The author quotes figures of 12,000 trainers operating in a £3 billion market with no single company having a significant share; he also mentions that the market becomes even bigger if you add on internal providers. This is an extreme example of a fragmented market that no-one fully understands.

The market has become even more fragmented in recent years as buyers of training have become more selective and employees have been given more responsibility for their own training. There have been less ‘one size fits all’ corporate programmes, more personal or divisional approaches to meeting specific needs. This means that there are less internal management trainers and more opportunities for flexible specialists; the article quotes a company where eighteen internal management trainers 20 years ago has reduced to one today.

These changes have been accompanied by a pressure that we at MTP are constantly fighting against; the desire for shorter programmes, often to cover the same content. The author shares our view that such pressure should be resisted because the extreme example he quotes - 500 slides to cover project management in one day - does not lead to client satisfaction. Instead we should be pushing for less content rather than being pressed into overloading. Our argument should be that though technology may have moved on, the human brain works in much the same way as 50 years ago.

There is also an interesting comment that the ‘classroom’ is still the dominant location for off the job training; e-learning is even now only 14% of training hours and is, in many cases, not much better than reading a book. I was surprised that the author didn’t move on to stress the importance of interaction and engagement to both forms of learning; instead he made the more obvious points that e-learning is better for the harder, knowledge based topics and that a blended approach is the way forward.

This was all very interesting and in some cases insightful but the ‘so what’ factor will be the main impact on most readers. It would have been good to explore some of the issues arising from these fundamental changes, for instance, for the provider, the impact on trainer recruitment, development, motivation and retention, and for L&D professionals in companies, supplier selection.

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http://www.trainingjournal.com/feature/articles-features-2011-10-01-the-evolution-of-training/