A Brief History of (Formal) Training
My industrial history might be a bit patchy, but try this story out for size.
Around the start of the 20th century, pretty much all 'industrial' work was craftwork. It was practical. It was about making things, making them better, more reliable and making more of them faster. This required practical skills, the kind of skills an expert craftsman could show you how to do, often over an extended period of time. 'Management' was discharged by the rich and powerful, and was pretty basic: you worked, you got paid; if you didn't do enough work or good enough work, you got fired. No unions, limited workforce mobility, even less employment law, no need for great management skills either.
Then came mass production and Taylorism, and with it mass employment at relatively low skill levels. With 100s of people doing the same job, you needed them all trained up the same. So training (face to face, of course) also became a large-scale repeatable activity, and it worked, with armies of workers trained to execute practical tasks in the One Best Way.
By the early 21st century, all manner of technological advances have changed the nature of work and given rise to all kinds of work that never previously existed, requiring new skills and different knowledge. Automation, enabled by IT, profoundly changed what we do and how we do it. Telecommunications has diffused the location and timing of work. The skill levels required tend to be higher and more cerebral, knowledge workers are commonplace. Company value, previously measured in physical assets, is now dependent on intangibles like Human Capital: it’s all about what's in the employees' heads, their ability to innovate, etc..
Not only has the work changed, but management now assumes far greater importance. Human Capital depends as much on how humans work together, as it does on the intrinsic level of their skills. Add to this high levels of technological change, economic turmoil, workforce mobility and skills shortages, then management and leadership emerge as vital and complex disciplines.
Given how the world of work has changed so dramatically, I am surprised that our prevailing image of the main task which equips people for work (i.e. the classroom course) persists so strongly. In passing, I’m also curious that at the same time, on-the-job training still holds derogatory connotations, through phrases like “sitting by Nellie”.
We have known for a very long time that formal instruction is just part of the development process. Medieval craftsmen knew this – it was partly why they formed Guilds. For all their faults, Guilds provided a great framework for the development of skills through the medieval forerunner of the apprenticeship.
Today, so much business success is dependent upon employees being skilfully creative, for example:
· interpreting each particular customer situation and responding accordingly;
· regularly making rapid decisions based on incomplete data;
· developing innovative approaches to maintain competitive advantage in an ever-changing marketplace.
In such an environment, how can we expect any kind of standardised formal training programme to really deliver significant improvements?
Don’t get me wrong, large-scale formal training still has a place, but it’s unlikely to deliver high levels of competence, and certainly not on its own. For more advanced skills, some kind of personalised, on-demand (and probably on-the-job) learning is vital. We need to embrace the technologies that facilitate peer-to-peer information sharing on a global basis, and give employees freedom to experiment and innovate.
Kevin Lovell
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