BE, DO, GET
 
As professionals how do we grow in our business careers?  Academic studies usually form the platform to which we add: on the job experience; books, articles, blogs and websites; mentors showing us the short cuts; cleverer colleagues providing insights and continuing professional development through training.  One of the issues with the training component is the effectiveness of what is being offered.  The classic brand name University residencies for executives are limited to the chosen few.  What about the majority of our teams – how can we get liftoff across the whole organisation?
 
In-house training, either delivered internally or externally and attendance at publically offered training, as well as on-line training, are the main provenance of corporate skill building.  On-line training is relatively inexpensive, easily accessible and in most cases rather passive in its approach.  The completion rates for this format are also extremely low, at around 10%, for self-directed learning.
 
Classroom delivery led by instructors is still the main stay for corporate training.  Sadly, it is predominantly ineffective.  Our teams are sent off to training, HR ticks the job well done “completed” box and we all move on.  What has been retained from the training?  Even more importantly, what has been implemented after the training?  What are the subsequent performance outcomes from the injection of training?  John Wanamaker was famously quoted as saying half of his advertising spend was wasted but he didn’t know which half.  For training if it was only 50%, we should be popping the corks and celebrating.
 
In most cases, training fails at three points.  The pre-training briefing between supervisor and staff is a key intervention to set up the learning experience.  In Japan this hardly ever occurs, so staff turn up at training venues either bewildered or skeptical, or both.  The second breakdown point is the delivery in the training room by the instructor.  I will elaborate on the sins of instructors in a moment. The post-training follow up is the third area, where refresh and reinforcement takes place.  In Japan, there is usually no follow-up.
 
Instructors in Japan are often not highly skilled.  The company’s own internal instructors are usually the worst, because they are not given much opportunity to further develop themselves.  They operate in a vacuum and the train-the-trainer experience, which supposedly sets them up as professionals, is often a thin and weak gruel.  They have a captive audience, the price is usually zero and so they do not have to face the rigours of the marketplace.  Internal politics within the organization is often the biggest factor in determining their career progression.
 
External trainers operate in a crowded, competitive mart.  The barriers to entry, however, to set up your own training shop are basically almost non-existent.  Anyone can emerge from the chrysalis, butterfly like, and become a trainer at whim.  In Japan, there is a trainer bias toward following the university model of instruction, which is to lecture.  Consequently, the usual Japanese local domestic trainer methodology is very much one-way traffic - I talk, you listen.
 
In our modern internet-driven world, access to information is a given and the lecture driven format is basically bankrupt.  Overseas Universities are finally working this out for themselves and changing how they deliver their classes.  Japanese Government bureaucrats will probably catch up with this need for varsity revision sometime in 22AD, but business can’t wait that long.  Some more advanced local instructors may have worked out that there is this thing called two-way traffic and may be inviting the classroom participants to discuss ideas in small groups and may be even share those ideas with the whole group. Wow…. breathtaking innovations!
 
With the most wonderful intentions in the world, they are doing their best but honestly, in this age, it is just n