The kind of trainings we really need in companies
Training is supposedly one of the best way to keep employees motivated. Providing good training as an employer not only shows the employee you literally invest in some time and money in them, but also show you care about the future.
When I ask my colleagues which trainings they would chose for the year to come, I always collect the same demotivated answers: “well, I don’t really know, everything looks the same to me”. And they were right. Besides the programs all look the same. They are all based on sitting passively and listening to an expert talk about his topic. Where are the real-life example? Where is the practice? I don’t want to have the same learning experience in my job than what I had in school. The whole point of working life is that you’re supposed to an active participant of the change. I don’t want to listen to somebody about how great change makers they are, I want to experiment the change! I want to be able to try and fail during the training so that when I will try my new skill in real work life with my stakeholders and external partners they won’t have to suffer as much from my learning curve, and I will have built in some confidence to execute my new mission better. With remote work, it has become even worse. We sit and listen to a very skilled trainer during hours, desperately bored when they are doing their very best to make the class interactive with little questionnaires to fill in with our phones.
We need leading by example, we need to have a safe space to try and fail, we need to practice. Shadowing a better skilled colleague should be more accessible. Having leaders that have both the guts and the humility to show us how they started and to guide us step by step towards their level of mastery.
