Godfrey Parkin has an interesting post in regards to corporate training, surrounding the current debate on the decay of the American public school system. He identifies parallels to current issues with corporate training initiatives and the problems with the American public school system.
Stupid in America
Parkin states, "I don’t buy the argument that the blame for the
dumbing-down of America’s youth falls exclusively on the educational
system. It seems clear to me that culture, particularly the culture in
the family, has failed to instill a strong enough veneration for
learning and corresponding intellectual curiosity. Parents abdicate
responsibility for educating their kids, particularly when they get a
little difficult in their early teens. It is easier to concoct a host
of external reasons for a child’s learning problems than to acknowledge
personal failure. But learning takes place within an evolving
ecosystem, not in isolated instances.
Companies make the same
mistake – they think that performance problems should be solved by
training, and if that doesn’t work, training gets the blame. How many
times do we hear trainers bemoan the fact that the environment to which
trainees return almost guarantees that what was learned will never be
reinforced or applied? It was only after I left school that I
understood the real purpose of homework was not to keep me from going
fishing, but to get my parents engaged in the education process. We
should do more to integrate learning with the workplace and engage
managers and the immediate “work family” in supporting the ongoing
development of new skills. Blended learning should blend what happens
in class or online with what happens back at work, and that means
getting the learners’ immediate colleagues engaged as a support network.
Looking
from the outside at the way schools perform can teach lessons and
prompt questions about corporate training. Are issues of choice,
teaching passion, learning culture, and budget echoed in corporate
training? Is it not more important to build a culture within the
organization that overtly values and rewards learning, rather than use
it as a reward in itself? By outsourcing much of our training,
particularly to vendors who are not held accountable for anything more
than smile sheet scores, do we risk the same abdication of
responsibility and dilution of influence to which so many American
parents have apparently succumbed?
Parkin has many great insights and the parallel he draws here is true to a certain extent. No amount of money, or perfectly executed e-learning / learning management systems implementation as part of a corporate training program is no match for an organization's corporate culture and business model if the culture and model does not support learning in its direct application to the daily exigencies of a learner's work life and job responsibilities. It is just plain stupid for a corporation to have a corporate training program and not to have an environment that supports the learner and allows them to apply their new found knowledge on a consistent basis in their work life and job responsibilities so it can be measured and tracked to insure continuous improvement, performance support, and job satisfaction.
Dave Boggs
SyberWorks
