After watching the Winter Olympics, I am once again ready to plop my fanny in a bobsled and plunge down an icy gutter at ninety miles per hour. What a rush that must be! Besides living in southern Indiana and the only icy gutters hang on my house, I am so far from a state of readiness that the only outcome from the bobsled plunge would be certain injury or possibly death by impact. How many times do we put our workforce through hours of training and consider them to be at a state of readiness to take a “business plunge” that, while not death-defying, is placing real tangible business value at risk?
Tag: readiness
After thirty plus years in corporate training and cross-industry learning leadership roles, I can say with confidence that the velocity of change has been greater in the world of business operations than it has in the world of training. Certainly, countless new technologies surfaced over the years as innovative enhancements in the training world, but for many, the application of these technologies merely enabled the function of training to fall short even faster and with less human intervention. The shift to e-learning, all too often, became a digitized version of classroom training, and did precious little to improve human performance in the workplace. So…is this an indictment of the training profession? Absolutely not! It is a shot across the bow to forewarn that our job as professionals in the corporate learning space just got bigger than the traditions we cling to like flotation devices in a water landing.
Sounds downright subversive, maybe even a wee bit scandalous does it not? Very likely, this title may imply behavior that is a little risky too. Personally, I think it is high time we view risk as a catalyst, not a restrainer…and that could be “too much caffeine” doing the talking. Seriously, it is time to act on the risks that threaten training as we know it. Please do not confuse passionate posturing of an idea with a radical rant, though what you read in this post has earmarks of both. So hang on! What set me off this morning was someone whining on one of the LinkedIn groups I frequent. They wondered why quality training was not respected by top management, and would it ever return to prominence, and how the economy had impacted budgets, dealing training a death blow…etc.…and off I went… .
I like the concept of “re-thinking” training organizations based in HR, and I say this from personal work history primarily based in the training space over the last thirty plus years. The blended perspective I have comes from working both inside and outside of HR in training organizations. I found them to have a very different focus.