McTraining
..by Charles L. Fields

“We can’t take 3 days away from work for a training, so can you cut it to two days?” I get asked that question a lot these days. There’s a lot of pressure to “do it in less time AND cover all the material AND include practical exercises to build their skills”. If it’s a three-day workshop, people want it in two. If I offer two days, they want one.

I hear quite a few reasons why the training needs to be shorter. Here are my favorite top 10 reasons as to WHY people wanted shorter training programs…

10. “We can’t take 3 days away from work for training; they won’t like it.”
9. “You don’t understand our culture; our people are used to a faster pace.”
8. “We budgeted for two days.”
7. “Our people get bored easily.”
6. “We know there is slack time in the training design.”
5. “E-Learning could do it in a few hours and at the participant’s leisure.”
4. “Other people only take 1 day.”
3. “We just need to show on our goal list that we addressed this issue.”
2. “Our people are really intelligent, with years of experience so they won’t need all that time.”

And my # 1 favorite reason, “Why we can’t do a three day workshop”, is…

1. “We have a day free in our 5 day off-site meeting and thought this would be good.”

Let’s face it. We are addicted to speed! Technology enables us to do things faster. So, we want everything to be faster. We just don’t have the time for three days. We have an impatience to get things finished.

This need for speed is pushing people to want shorter and shorter training times. What concerns me is that the requests are coming people who know better – other training professionals. They already know about learning theory and should realize the impact of shortening a program. I will admit that there is some slack time built into most workshops, yet there is NOT an entire day in a three-day workshop.

The problem is, you can’t condense the time and still do everything. Something gets sacrificed. We need to think about what we lose and what it costs. Beyond the obvious content and time, I see three things that we sacrifice when we shorten training times.

The first is practice. I like to do workshops where people get to practice in a safe environment. Practice builds confidence. Confidence builds courage. And with courage people may try some of their new skills. Practice let’s people know how they’re doing. You have someone to coach you and offer suggestions. You get to try various approaches to see how they work. You build some skills.

Next, is contemplation. There is something magical about the night. We relax and begin to think, sometimes at an unconscious level. We contemplate. And as we contemplate, questions emerge, questions that we didn’t have earlier. Possibilities occur, possibilities we didn’t see before. We begin to see things differently and to think differently. We begin to learn. Without contemplation we tend to stay in our old mode of thinking and very little changes.

And last I see us losing relationships. We need contact with others. If you want to get to know people better, spend some time with them. Organizations want people to work together to build a sense of community yet give them few opportunities to meet and talk. In a one day workshop, I feel like I just begin to recognize some of the people and it’s time to go.

What’s the cost of losing practice, relationships, and contemplation? Training may end up being superficial, lacking depth with little change occurring. Without a change in thinking and some practice people have limited patience or confidence to try something new. The result? The money and time spent will be wasted and the reputation of the training group diminished.

I want the longer workshops. I like taking the time to practice…to think…to build relationships. So if you call and say, “Give me the three day workshop, hold the third day.” Don’t expect me to ask, “Do you want fries with that?”