Tuesday, April 17, 2012

14% of Employees Value Corporate Training as Essential to their Learning

14% is not good. Shocking? No? Almost 70% went even further and marked company training as somewhat or not important. What's up with that?


As someone who has suffered through horrific corporate training experiences this does not surprise me.

As someone who has spent more than 15 years working to make corporate training better, this annoys me.


From Jane's blog post:
"But I think the biggest take-away from my survey is that we can no longer assume we know how people like to learn in the workplace nor how we think people should learn."
You can read more about Jane Hart's anonymous survey results on her blog Learning in the Social Workplace.

There is a certain reality that everyone in any corporation seems to understand about in-house corporate training: It sucks!  Even those of us working to improve eLearning and Training designs know about this negative perception.  And yet, while everyone hates mandatory courses, and very few employees change their behavior based on training courses, we continue to play the game. Companies continue to pay for it, and other companies are willing to provide it.

In my opinion this is not a training problem.  This is a human problem that involves every aspect of each employee's personal and professional life.  This is where we begin to look at learning as a whole instead of just the training parts.

If learning is the desired outcome then we may want to pay attention to data like this.  I'm hoping to see more comprehensive reports in the near future confirming Jane's results.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can resonate to this post being in the L&D field and just recently experiencing orientation training that made me wish I was somewhere else. But I decided not to pay to much attention to the poor delivery and lack of training enthusiasm and channel my thoughts into making a difference. But how many people actually have this attitude of wanting to learn and contribute towards the organisation they are working for, in fact the whole idea of "working for" needs to shift to "working with". Also if employees are able to see the value they bring into the company they are working at, I am sure their perspective of wanting to acquire more skills and knowledge will change provided that the org also has capable trainers and training programs plus leaders who knows what leadership means. Behavioral change is vital if we want to see more enthusiastic learners.

Lori's IDT Blog said...

I think we have all suffered through our share of inadequate training courses of one type or another. Though, I am unsure of where this thought comes from since I am in the Instructional Design field. Of course, I know the importance of workplace orientation explaining policies and procedures as well as learning the ins and outs of work responsibilities. However, I find myself often wondering why I am being subjected to such nonsense in the way of presentation. Perhaps it is because I am always critiquing the presenter: wanting to make suggestions for better design or ways to motivate and encourage active listening by the audience. Regardless, it is important for us all to realize why we are involved in workplace training. It needs to be recognized as necessary and useful information. Providing useful and professional trainers is a large part of good presentation; Human Resource staff and supervisors are not always the appropriate choice for presenting a large amount of information, often the audience is left asking for more when their questions are not able to be successfully answered. I agree with the previous comment that the behaviors presented by both trainer and learner must be those of a willingness to better themselves and succeed in order to motivate all of those around them.

Lori's IDT Blog said...

I think we have all suffered through our share of inadequate training courses of one type or another. Though, I am unsure of where this thought comes from since I am in the Instructional Design field. Of course, I know the importance of workplace orientation explaining policies and procedures as well as learning the ins and outs of work responsibilities. However, I find myself often wondering why I am being subjected to such nonsense in the way of presentation. Perhaps it is because I am always critiquing the presenter: wanting to make suggestions for better design or ways to motivate and encourage active listening by the audience. Regardless, it is important for us all to realize why we are involved in workplace training. It needs to be recognized as necessary and useful information. Providing useful and professional trainers is a large part of good presentation; Human Resource staff and supervisors are not always the appropriate choice for presenting a large amount of information, often the audience is left asking for more when their questions are not able to be successfully answered. I agree with the previous comment that the behaviors presented by both trainer and learner must be those of a willingness to better themselves and succeed in order to motivate all of those around them.

Unknown said...

I, myself, couldn’t be at all compassionate with the low number in statistics. Organizations should design an approach that would allow the employees to enjoy and learn at the same time, rather than feel hustled all throughout the training course. You have a point, though, that this is just a matter of perspective. But you see, it is easier for people to like things that are likeable in the first place. Gamification training is a good approach to start with.

Rigoberto Stokes