Company Training Quality
With knowledge workers, I believe companies don’t get their return on investment training their knowledge workers and they reluctantly give training because it’s easy for departing employees to say they had a lack of training.
Now companies have to give trainings - what kind of trainings do they give?? Specifically, why are trainings “meh”??
This is a great question - and given what I wrote about knowledge workers and why companies even have training, I believe these are some reasons for company trainings to be “meh”.
Let’s see what the range of company trainings can range from: go train yourself (i.e. here’s a budget), to external training companies brought in for a day, to a dedicated internal training team.
Train Yourself!
There’s a wide range. If your company expects you do the trainings given the budget, well - you can only blame yourself for poor trainings. 😜
Typical Training
The next two, external training companies and internal training teams seem to follow a similar pattern:
Take whatever book is the Management Du Jour and give a training on it.
These trainings are easy, because there’s a guide (a book) and there’s appeal (no need to sell training on participants.) Nothing worse for a company to pay for training and nobody attends!
Hence, these types of trainings are most common.
The other side of this is that these trainings are enough to make the company look kewl while they can ammortize the cost of the training amongst participants - which should be a lot since they’re only giving trendy trainings (whether they improve your day-to-day is another matter.)
Conclusion
No matter what - company trainings are gonna be “meh”.
- There’s no “ROI” on knowledge workers.
- Trainings are a reaction to leaving employees who kept saying they are leaving the job because they didn’t have enough training.
- Companies just want to do the minimum to seem cool.
Finally, remember - your workload increases with attending training, so make sure you keep up.
If you want to get the most value out of training, teach your team what you got from the training when you are back!