Most of our clients come to us after witnessing good employees struggle with their workloads. These clients might ask us for classroom training because their personal experience tells them it’s the best way to learn. Other clients request online training because they hear it’s cheaper than hiring facilitators, or because it reaches a distributed audience and they need three hundred new auditors trained across the country. Or because they recall the experience of sitting, invisibly bound, in uninspiring classrooms, and shudder.
I understand that leaders want someone to alleviate the suffering of their workers. I get that. They want someone to remove the obstruction in the sink and make it workable again. Training professionals are used to this. We are often tasked with mending the hole in the sock; finding the learning gap and then suturing it as painlessly as possible. We’re used to this approach, but we know there’s a better way. It’s not “buy another sink,” or “unclog it yourself,” but “consider the sink before it gets clogged.”
Anticipation is amazing. It’s a feeling you get when your leader warns, “there’re gonna be a few changes around here.” It’s a feeling that rises to the surface when you know that the current state of affairs will not last. An expiry date as a concept is coming up, and in the air you can feel the electric charge of change. When you can back up that feeling with deadlines and stats and org charts and instructions- well, that’s the best time to formally train your employees.
It’s emergency planning. It’s watching the fire safety technique “stop, drop, and roll” on TV before the house catches fire. It’s seeing change hover in the horizon, and then doing something about it. The best time for formal instruction is when you know almost nothing.
A great article that lists benefits of formal and informal learning can be found here.
Happy learning,
Frannie
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