Instructor-Led Training is not exactly “in” these days.
- One recent study states the top 6 things workers believe are essential for Learning have nothing to do with Instructor-led Training and range from “Sharing knowledge with my team”, to “Web research for resources” to “External news feeds and blogs”. Way down the list at # 7 was “Company Training / e-learning”.
- The “70-20-10 Theory of Learning” is alive and well in the Training industry where the belief (this too is based on surveys) is that real corporate learning comes from 70% on the job experience, 20% from social encounters ( learning from co-workers or boss) and 10% from formal corporate (mostly instructor led) training.
I think the workers in the first study believe what they say about essentials for learning. I know there are legions of L&D professionals who believe in the 70-20-10 Theory.
All would be wrong however.
Here’s what we’re all forgetting: Corporate Instructor – Led (live or virtual) Training is more often than not, at the beginning of an essential foundational learning period (like onboarding or new hire training) or when something completely new or transformational is occurring (new products, new systems) and as such, this type of training falls in the realm of Primacy Theory.
Captain Sully Sullenberger knows this. When his plane went down in the Hudson 7 years ago he talked at a conference about Primacy and not just the retrieval and leveraging of his skills learned in his earliest training days while flying- but spoke of his veteran crew of flight attendants screaming “Brace, brace, heads down, stay down! Brace, brace, heads down, stay down.” This was not, he explained, what they were recently and for the last 5 years been trained to say in an emergency like this. Rather the crew shouted out what they learned 20 years ago when they first were trained in emergency procedures. Primacy Learning sticks.
Primacy Learning is a learning period that both psychologically and neurologically creates almost life long, unshakable connections to content delivered in this period. It does so because it is in this period where learners make their first mental maps around new transformative ideas and literally in parts of the brain, hard wires these. Core concepts in this type of training stick hard thus giving Instructor-Led Training a big leg up on real value vs. being reason number #7 in the worker survey and the “10%” in learning theory of 70-20-10.
It’s not there aren’t other effective and sometimes cooler ways to learn than instructor led training – there are. It’s not that people don’t perceptually think they learn 90% more about the job from experience and talking with others- they may in fact believe that. The reality however, is that the Instructor-Led Training, especially when delivered in the primacy stages of learning, is the stuff that lies below your iceberg; you may not think that’s how you learned what do to at work because you don’t see it or consciously remember the instructor led training every day, but it is foundation upon which much of the other things you learn sit upon.
Never underestimate the investment you should make in Instructor-Led Training. It’s critical. It needs to be glorious. It needs to be inspirational and correct. Instructor Led Corporate Training today shouldn’t look like it did 10 years ago (obviously brain science has taught us much) but it will never die and we’ll hardly do anything more important.
Till next time,
Grow The Business.
Mark
Mark McCarthy's Blog 