For much of my professional life, I have been paid to do training. It has been very well received in the sense that I have (usually) obtained high ratings, and clients not only paid their bills, but invited me back to do it again and again.
However, I now believe that the majority of business training, by me and by everyone else, is a waste of money and time, because only a microscopic fraction of training is ever put into practice and the hoped-for benefits obtained.
Unfortunately, training and other kinds of meetings and conferences are too often organized as stand-alone events, with a life of their own, disconnected from the firm’s progress.
What companies don’t seem to understand is that, as I shall discuss later in this article, training is a wonderful last step in bringing about changed organizational and personal behavior, but a pathetically useless first step.
Companies train people in new areas but then send them back to their operating groups, subject to the same measures and management approaches as before.
People can detect immediately a lack of alignment between what they are being trained in and how they are being managed. When they do detect it, little, if any, of what has been discussed or ‘trained’ ever gets implemented.