The Training Game

The Training Game

We’ve all observed how most people become more proficient over time as they gain experience in their jobs: teachers, police officers, insurance agents, pilots, scuba divers. Even with excellent training, one needs to experience the work, have formal and informal mentors around, gain from others’ expertise, and learn from interacting with customers, clients, suppliers, and so forth.

So why do we “settle” for putting people through training programs and throwing them back on the job or into a new job as if that’s sufficient to ensure they can apply new skills, without any continuing coaching or measures for improvement? Various sources cite revenues from management training programs at about $14 billion in the US last year. What’s the return on that investment?

No one really knows, because there are usually no metrics to determine how much performance and productivity have improved. (For example, you could judge that pretty easily in sales training, where higher revenues are easy to measure.)

So we don’t know what that $14 billion results in, other than a very expensive ticket getting stamped.