For the instructional designers out there:
If you’ve ever worked for an employer in corporate training … Have you had learners who want training, but their leadership doesn’t value it?
Too often, managers & supervisors see training as taking people “away from their real jobs” or “out of production.” If you asked them, they’d never go so far as to say that training is a waste of time, but they’d rather see their people at their desks or on the shop floor, being “productive.”
Are employees productive without training?
The problem with this thinking is that without training, many employees aren’t productive. They end up asking a co-worker how to do some part of their job and now two employees have stopped working while one trains the other. It may only take a couple of minutes, but there will likely be several instances of “just a couple of minutes” as the new person learns all they need to know. The time involved is one piece of the puzzle. Another is that there’s a chance the new person picks up bad habits from the experienced employee. And even worse, the “trainer” may come to resent the newbie for the time away from their “real” job.
I’m not saying that learning from a co-worker is always a bad idea. There’s value in job shadowing or looking over someone’s shoulder to see how it’s done. But if that’s the entirety of a department’s “training,” they’re missing a huge opportunity.
Even with training, mistakes will happen, but without training, it’s likely there will be more mistakes. I’ve seen a case where the leadership didn’t value the training program, so new hires were left to ask questions and learn on the job from co-workers. There was no plan, no intentional process to get new employees up to speed. When that leader left and new leadership came in, one of the first things they noticed was that far too many mistakes were being made. The new leader talked with a few people and came to our training group with a list of topics their people needed help with. The courses already existed since we had provided this training a few years earlier (under prior leadership). It was just a matter of refreshing the courses (both CBTs and in-person) and getting the people trained ASAP.
It reminds me of the old cartoon that’s been around the L & D world for years:
- A company’s CFO and CEO are talking.
- The CFO says, “What if we train our people and they leave?”
- The CEO replies, “What if we don’t, and they stay?”
One has a short-sighted view, thinking only of the immediate financial cost. The other takes the long view and thinks strategically. The CEO recognizes the benefit that training brings to the organization.