This is your brain on training

Traditional classroom training is alive and well in corporations, despite all evidence that it's craptastic. Sure, if the trainer in question is a really dynamic speaker, and if the material is relevant to you, and if you can manage to pull the gems of wisdom out of the lecture, then you might come out of it with a few nuggets you can actually use back at Ye Olde Cubicle Farme.

But most of the time, and for most of us, a classroom training session is a great opportunity to catch up on e-mail (curse you, BlackBerry!), daydreaming, or some light doodling; for the record, none of the above is conducive to you leaving the room able to do something new (or better), which is what training is supposed to be about.

I'm not suggesting that it's impossible to get effective training in a classroom setting; I am saying that you can't get effective training in a traditional classroom lecture with a 3,000-slide PowerPoint presentation (and you just know that all 3,000 slides have line upon line of bulleted lists, don't you?). That training model is a push model: I know stuff that you don't, and I'm going to talk about it until I'm blue in the face and you're imagining me in a muzzle. I'm going to spoon feed you factoids and concepts, and by golly you're going to leave this room knowing everything I know.

Listen, there's a time and place for speeches and presentations, but a training session isn't it. Let me give you a few reasons why:

• If you're giving a speech in front of, say, your local Chamber of Commerce, you have a willing audience that wants to hear what you have to say. In a corporate training setting, you likely have a captive audience, and at least a few of those audience members have a list (as long as your 3,000 slide presentation) of things they'd rather be doing.
• In a speech or presentation, your goal is to enlighten and entertain; if you're training a group of people, the goal is get the audience to be able to do something they couldn't do before.
• In order to achieve the goal of helping people gain competency in a task or job function, they have to be engaged in using that competency or job function.

In tomorrow's entry, I'm going to talk about what you can do to make classroom training worthwhile to the students. In the interim, here are a few questions you should ask yourself:

1. When you develop a training course, is your goal to help your students learn, or is it to help them do?
2. Do you want your students to think that you're knowledgeable and smart?
3. When was the last time you told the powers that be (hereafter known as TPTB) that training wouldn't fix their problem?
4. Before you develop training, how much research do you conduct in order to make sure that the skill you're teaching is the skill that's needed to deal with the performance gap?