Typically, “training” makes people think of practice, skill development and know-how, while “education” brings to mind theory, knowledge and values (Rickman, 2004). Another difference involves measurable objectives and assessment. And yet another involves how captive the learners are and their motivation.
Many training programs focus on demonstrated and participant structured practice. Often, the training is prepackaged and sold to attendees or corporations with little needs analysis. Popular and experienced trainers are well-rehearsed and the training creates valuable learning opportunities and good vibes. And for a few days, the participants recognize the value of the training and are motivated to put the training into practice. This is the “post-training high” that most people experience after the event.
Short-term gains of training
But why does this “training program high” usually only last a few days or weeks and then motivation and behavior usually revert to pre-training levels?
Training programs are particular forms of edutainment. The trainer knows the attendees are using their own time to be there, perhaps on weekends or weeknights. The trainer makes an effort to make the training educational, but also fun and interesting. The entertainment and “feel good factor” is very important to make the event and experience out of the ordinary. And perhaps to hide its shortcomings.
Entertainment vs. education
So, most successful and popular training programs and gurus deliver edutainment where entertainment tends to be valued over education.
Trainers are often very accomplished in their fields and enjoy passing along their knowledge and know-how to people. They often learn from their experiences in training and those who write books about training. However, these trainers rarely have a background in education.
Professional educators, in contrast, will start course design by setting clear and quantifiable objectives that can be assessed with feedback. In this way, course content and teaching are decided with assessment in mind to determine whether skills and knowledge have in fact been learned and by how much. Caring professional educators will not just measure learning, but also pay close attention to:
- knowledge transmission – relevant and personalized to help them encode it,
- practice and learning – sufficiently difficult practice that is spaced and repeated to help consolidation,
- assessment – frequent measured performance and/or testing to see how much learning was achieved, and finally
- feedback – meaningful advice about learners’ strengths and weaknesses and how they can further improve.
These steps will maximize the odds solving the most basic problem of learning: turning short-term memory into long-term memory (for mor eon this, see the blog https://nigelpdaly.com/2021/02/26/the-science-of-learning-or-probability-stacking/).
From this comparison of professional trainers and educators, we might assume that trainers have limited knowledge and teaching know-how. But I don’t think this is necessarily true, or at least it is not the main reason. There are other constraints in the training context that make it difficult to translate training into education. But not impossible.
Training Constraints … are mostly commercial, not educational
Constraint 1: Duration
Trainers face several constraints, but the main one involves learning duration. Training seminars can range from 3 to 12 hours, and training courses may be more than 12 hours. For the convenience and efficiency of the trainer, attendee and sponsoring organization, the training is kept within a short time period, like a weekend or if held at a sponsoring company, perhaps 1 to 3+ days during the week. Clearly, there is little that can be effectively conveyed, let alone practiced, in such a short period of time. And once the event finishes, there is no follow-up.
Constraint 2: Audience and its size
The number of participants has a strong impact on training delivery. To justify training costs and/or maximize profits for the trainer, the size of the attendee audience can range from dozens to hundreds. Large audiences mean that the trainer can not monitor practice and is forced to minimize individual or group practice time and maximize his or her impact on the audience. Large training sessions are often run by gurus who pass along know-how and tips, but heavily rely on their own charisma to keep the audience engaged and buzzing, even after the training event finishes. Valuable content plus engaging trainer equals a transformative experience where new insights are experienced by the audience.
Constraint 3: Time is money
Another constraint is related to the audience number: giving people’s money’s worth. If participants pay a lot of money for the training, they may feel impatient if the trainer spends a lot of time on having attendees practice, which almost always means working with at least 1 other person. This means at any given time, at least half of the group experience downtime, or non-active participation, and that can feel like time wasting for many who paid a lot for the training. Trainers are acutely aware of this and so, by default, they feel the pressure to run training events that are jam-packed with information and advice.
Commercial accountability: the business of training
You might notice that these three constraints are more about the business of training. We can call this commercial accountability. This means being accountable to the attendees’ convenience and money to give them the biggest bang for the buck. Ironically, learning accountability gets the short end of the stick. Instead of focusing on skill development, training programs focus on optimizing the participants’ use of their time and money. The objectives are typically to provide a lot of valuable knowledge in the shortest time possible and leave it up to the participants to find a way and the time to turn that knowledge into skills. Skills like driving a car or video editing may start with knowledge of the driver’s area or video editing software, but for the knowledge to become skill, a lot of practice is necessary.
Given their commercial constraints and priorities, training programs demonstrate their value by quantifying the knowledge, time and convenience they provide. And while training gurus understand the importance of edutainment and often make the training experience an engaging and transformative one, the fact still remains: participants have to figure out how to take the knowledge and turn it into know-how.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of training attendees ever successfully acquire the skills from training sessions. And how did they do it?
In Part 2, we will look at a task-based approach to skills training and assessment as an effective alternative to typical training sessions.
References
Rickman, P. (2004). Education versus training. Philosophy Now, 47, 31-32.
