The Death of Classroom Training Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

Posted: Thursday July 14, 2011 under Tips for Trainers

Who has the time or money to send their employees (or themselves) to an actual training class anymore? You know, the place where people used to gather face-to-face to talk and listen and learn and practice what they learn. Aren’t those old whiteboard-walled classrooms as empty these days as newspaper offices and public phone booths?

Vince Crew, guest contributor at TheStreet.com, recently touted the tenacious relevance and advantage of the company classroom. Here is a portion of his case, followed by a link to the entire article.

Vince …

NEW YORK (TheStreet) — All right, has everyone gotten over the sexiness, inexpensiveness, and convenience of e-learning yet? It was sooooo alluring to think self-paced, ad hoc technology would drastically lessen, if not totally replace face-to-face, classroom/conference settings, and dynamic real-time interaction with fellow human beings.

Now reality’s set in. E-learning is a nice compliment but isn’t a substitute for instructor/facilitator-led old school. Why is this?

Despite all of the hoopla over technology — in every phase of our business — we still rise and fall on the ability of people to interact with, relate to and touch other people. Not even in accounting, billing, collections or other IT intensive function can we minimize the significance of a person-to-person meeting — not emailing, texting or even voice mailing, but physically talking with another person. The ultimate joke I saw was a web-based course on interpersonal communications skills and team building. That’s like learning to drive by CD . . . maybe it can be done, but there is certainly a quicker, more effective gain by actually getting in a car with an instructor.

Lively, interactive, face-to-face learning remains the most effective method when dealing with team and co-worker skills, process, and content training. The key is to focus on outcomes. Content facilitators and instructors need to craft discussion sessions that provide real-world sharing among attendees.

Perhaps when it comes to a cursory overview of a concept, technology suffices. However, true learning comes with trial and error, practice, and certainly an immersion in the real environment of distraction and interaction of co-workers, supervisors, etc. But the “old school” models of a stuffed shirt reading from a prepared script, armed with only research, statistics, and theoretical perspective, have to change.

Continue reading.

(Source: TheStreet.com, Corporate Training: Instructor Required, posted 06/30/11.)