On-site Training in the Real World

“Teaching is more than imparting knowledge, it is inspiring change.
Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding.”

William Arthur Ward

What they say about on-site training

On-site training can be a convenient and cost-effective way to train a group of people working at the same company. Advocates of this approach will usually suggest a list of benefits more or less like this:

• There are no travel expenses and the price of the course will also be cheaper
• The staff will stay informed about what’s going on at the office
• The staff will be in the office in case of a business emergency
• Attendees share the same objectives and it will be possible to talk about project-specific issues
• We can use our company's facilities
• The training will take place in a familiar environment
• People who are reluctant to travel will find it easier to attend the class

All of the points above are certainly true – at least in principle. But they don’t necessarily imply that the outcome of the on-site training will be a success, both cost-wise and goal-wise.

Things are not so simple

There are circumstances and factors that can transform your investment in on-site training into failure, and generate serious disappointment in managers, attendees and trainers.

To explain what the risks are, let’s address each of the points above from the bottom up.

“People who are reluctant to travel will find it easier to attend the class”

There are cases where someone, because of family issues or personal disabilities, may find it very hard to travel, especially when it means staying out for the night.

This is definitely a very good point for bringing the training on-site. But it’s not to be confused with the company’s needs to keep that person on-site, which is a different story that will be covered later.

“The training will take place in a familiar environment”

This sounds like a sensible idea, but it just doesn't work most of the time. The reason is that acquiring understanding and absorbing new concepts requires an environment that fosters the mental processes associated with this task – and the workplace is seldom the right place for that.

For one thing, the brain associates the workplace with the knowledge that the student already has and that make her/him successful on the job; in this situation there may be resistance to letting go of the sense of security and dive into a different world, where the student is a “rookie” again.

Another issue is about the mental reorganization of new information that the brain performs when is not busy paying attention to practical things. On the workplace, every moment in which the student is not attending the training is usually devoted to everyday job duties and social rituals: answering email, returning phone calls, fix problems, attend the occasional meeting, not missing the coffee break or lunch with job-mates and so on.

In such an environment what was just learned in the classroom is quickly dismissed to make room for “more important” tasks and a large part of the training effort is squandered.

“We can use our company's facilities”

This is a good point as long as the designated facility is a room designed for training.

When it's not (which is frequent) and the space is instead a meeting room, a re-arranged office or just a spare room, then the effectiveness of the training is very likely to suffer from issues like: noisy environments; poor air/temperature conditioning; adverse lighting conditions; and a spatial disposition of chairs, desks, projector and such that makes the overall experience quite uncomfortable for everybody.

It' important to remember that a training session requires from the attendees a concentration effort that spans several days. To get good results from the training, the environment should support that effort.

“Attendees share the same objectives and it will be possible to talk about project-specific issues”

This is really an attempt to squeeze too much out of the training bucks. The point here is simple: a classroom is no place for consulting. Training and consulting are two very different activities with different dynamics and different goals, and each deserve its own time and space.

Trying to do consulting in a classroom will just take valuable time out of learning and will likely confuse the attendees, whom may not yet have enough experience to tackle a real-life scenario with the concepts just learned.

However, this doesn't mean that a skilled and clever trainer may not use real-life examples from the company’s domain to clarify a concept, but that should be done for the sake of helping people to learn and not to come up with a workable solution to a specific, concrete problem.

“The staff will be in the office in case of a business emergency”

Developers are a critical resource when it comes to fixing technical problems, and companies with a strong need for operation continuity can't afford to empty their offices to send the development teams off to a training session. In this case, the solution clearly is to train, either on-site or off-site, only part of the staff while others stay at the office.

This training strategy is going to work, though, only if the managers make an active effort to guarantee that the people sent off to training are really undisturbed and insulated against company issues for the entire duration of the training.

Failing to do so (that is, interrupting the training to ask one or more attendees to fix a contingent problem) isn't only detrimental to the training effort of the entire group, but it's also a symptom of deeper management problems – it's hard to believe that a healthy company can depend so much on the constant presence of one or two individuals.

In this case, if the real problem is management, training the developers is not going to be the solution.

“The staff will stay informed about what’s going on at the office”

One reason why a person ought to stay constantly informed about what's going on at the office is the case described above, the one that points to management problems. Another reason is the (frequently false) sense of security that this generates in that person or in the management.

When is comes to getting value out of the training investment, neither of the reasons above is strong enough to accept that the students are constantly distracted by calls or text messages on their cell phones, by people entering the training room asking for someone and so on.

Things get worse when the students have computers connected to the company's intranet. Not only the student is constantly distracted by Instant Messages (IM) and emails, but he/she can't sometimes resist the temptation to work on a project or a problem while attending the training.

“There are no travel expenses and the price of the course will also be cheaper”

True.

But if low cost is the only or major deciding factor – instead of cost-effectiveness – then the results will be cheap as well.

Effective On-site Training

Effective on-site training, which basically means having a good return from the company's investment and from the attendees effort, is not just a matter of bringing a trainer in the office.

As explained above, the success of on-site training largely depends on attentive management and appropriate environment.

Creating a learning environment

An experienced trainer will provide valuable counsel on how to create a good learning environment, and getting this kind of advice before the training usually turns out to be a key success factor.

In-town Training

Sometimes a good alternative to on-site training is arranging the training session at a venue in the area where the client is. This is especially useful when creating a good learning environment at the office is difficult and, at the same time, traveling is not feasible for the attendees.

This kind of solution can be easily arranged in an hotel conference room or similar venue, and the students can use laptops for their exercises (if required).

There are of course extra costs to cover, but these are going to be smaller than covering travel expenses for all the attendees, and the more comfortable environment is going to pay off very well in terms of learning.

Three simple rules

In short, if you are planning some on-site training, there are three simple things to keep in mind that will largely improve the return of your investment:

• Hire the best trainer you can afford
• Provide the attendees with a comfortable learning environment (check this out with the trainer before the course)
• Make arrangements so that the people attending the on-site training are considered as if they were off-site for the entire duration of the course