[Mb-civic] Training courses - a waste of time

[Alexander Harper]

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Sathnam Sanghera: The kindergarten training course
By Sathnam Sanghera
Published: April 27 2006 17:50 | Last updated: April 27 2006 17:50

The other morning I received a message informing me that a training course I was due to attend had been cancelled “due to low delegate numbers”, an announcement I greeted by performing celebratory bhangra across the Financial Times newsroom. I was thrilled because: (1) it was the first e-mail I had received in several days that was not from a member of the RAC berating me for last week’s column; and (2) I was looking forward to the course about as much as being stabbed in the chest with a fork.

Entitled “Writing Creative Icebreakers and Energisers”, the away-day was a training course for course trainers, focusing on my least favourite aspect of corporate education – the bit where they attempt to energise a group or demonstrate a point about business by getting everyone to fall into each other’s arms, relate wacky facts about themselves and generally behave like 12-year-olds.

Nevertheless, still eager to establish whether icebreakers were as moronic in their conception as I suspected, I ordered several books on the internet and spent a morning reading about games such as “group-mind story”, where trainees are asked to make up a story together with each member contributing one word at a time, and “animal kingdom”, where trainees have to look at pictures of animals posted around the room (gorilla, ostrich, snake, donkey and so on) and then stand under the beast that best represents their “conflict mode”.
 
According to the writers, icebreakers such as these “motivate audiences to learn” and teach “communication skills”, “creative problem solving” and “conflict resolution”. But reading about them only brought me to the conclusion that they are a waste of time, much like the training courses in which they routinely appear. 

I accept this may sound a little mad to some people. After all, there is a general view in business that all training is intrinsically good: we talk about “well-trained” job candidates and training is commonly cited as a perk. But my viewpoint is not one that has been formed in a hurry. It has been developing since the end of my university career, when I realised that almost none of the hundreds of lectures I had attended had served any purpose whatsoever. Several times a week I would wake up at 8am and trudge through freezing fog to listen to some barely intelligible don rubbish the arguments that another barely intelligible don had made 50 years ago about a poet no one had read since 1969. Packing up my lecture notes after graduation it struck me that I would have learnt more and got more sleep if I had just read more.

The feeling has stuck with me in this job, which has required attending more than 14 courses in the last two years alone. At my most generous I can concede that certain courses with a practical bent – the ones designed to ensure doctors do not chop off arms instead of legs, that plumbers do not connect toilets to dishwashers, that city traders do not buy a billion shares instead of a million – serve a purpose. But most could be replaced with a book on the subject.

The icebreakers course is a case in point. If it had not been so tragically cancelled it would have cost at least eight hours of my time, £510 in fees and I would have had to endure the surreal experience of an entire day of icebreakers – the training equivalent of the film Groundhog Day. In the event I got the information I needed by spending £20 on books and devoting a few hours to reading them.

Trainers are fond of the saying: “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” But when it comes to corporate training the proverb should be amended: “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Send him on a training course on fishing and he will probably die of tedium before he gets to give it a try. Give him a book on fishing and he will eat for a lifetime.”

The fact is that adults do not need to be force-fed material like teenagers. Indeed, I am sure most teenagers would not put up with the babyishness of the icebreakers that characterise adult training courses.

And it seems I am not alone in my scepticism. Earlier this year, Hudson, a New York company specialising in human resources, published a survey of 1,674 employees in which one in three workers (34 per cent) said their last training programme was not worth the time. Another 12 per cent went further, saying it was a total waste of time. A previous poll of 2,500 British workers conducted by the Industrial Society and Training magazine also painted a grim picture: only 2 per cent of people said their training courses covered any new ground, while 23 per cent said the courses they attended were not appropriate to their needs.

At this point I imagine readers from the corporate training industry beating their chests like gorillas, kicking their legs like donkeys or hissing like snakes in protest, preparing to point out that they get lots of positive feedback at the end of courses and that the training industry is booming. After all, organisations in the US spend $51bn (£28.5bn) a year on training, according to Hudson.

But there are simple explanations for this. People write nice things on feedback forms because they do not want to be horrible to someone they have spent a day playing games with. And corporate training continues to boom because: (1) people are told to attend by their bosses; (2) people cannot help hoping that they might meet someone on the course they can flirt with; and (3) sometimes it is nice to get out of the office, even if it means sitting in a classroom and being treated like a halfwit.
 


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