On-Site Training - The Final Frontier
Transforming what would be a boring day on a team upbeat event
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
With the advent of home and remote working, there is an old practice that might become sexy again: Training held in a classroom. Hear me out for a complete article for 5 minutes. Today we have an opportunity to make what was sometimes a boring event into something that might impact teams and build better networking. The trick here is to make it special.
With the normalization of remote and home working, the training hours started to be spent on online platforms like Pluralsight and Udemy. These platforms can be great tools since they open the door for multiple-hour sessions with very complete libraries. We can even assume that any important training would be available on these platforms and wouldn’t the need to revert to classroom sessions anymore. It seems that for classroom training to become relevant, it needs to be tailor-made, otherwise, they don’t provide any added value to their online counterparts. Today, training held in a classroom can be instrumental in building better teams ever than before. How? Let’s dive right into it.
Tailor-made training
Online training platforms use videos as a tool to teach hard skills. These platforms even offer the possibility to run a lesson at the student’s own pace, which is something that physical classroom training lacks entirely. This is indeed a great advantage of online platforms and should be used across organizations since can be a very efficient tool. Nevertheless, this size-fits-all approach might not be proven sufficiently if an organization lacks a specific type of skills, even after attempting online lectures on the matter.
Organizations can organize training sessions with tailored content for their staff and even propose the preferred methodology. For example, for a company I worked on they had a specific need regarding Domain Driven Design. Even though the training about this topic was available online, there was a lack of practicality and real-life examples. So in conjunction with Senior Engineers, we have requested the market for proposals with a specific table of contents and a preferred methodology. We received from training providers old-school proposals that were boring copies of online offers but in a classroom format, but also we received really exciting prospects of having out-of-the-box training on this subject matter.
This means the organizations can leverage the market and request training fitting their needs, ask for specific trainer types or profiles, receive ideas and proposals from the providers, and organize unique training sessions. Having this type of training done, provides the staff with more strategic skills and be used as a great motivational tool.
But this can be made online as well? If the answer you are thinking is Yes, this means the message is not fully comprehended. The goal is to organize different, tailored, and dedicated trainings where the methodology is defined by you. This means the staff should not be on a desk with a pen and paper just to listen. The methodology should rely heavily on some sort of collaboration. The post-its have been collecting dust since the pandemic years, so this is an opportunity to use them again.
Networking and strengthening ties among the team
The social part of classroom training is something very difficult to match with online Zoom calls. For the same reason, I argue that 1:1 meetings should be done offline. There is a component of real-life exchange that is not matched with current online technologies.
This training will create networking opportunities with people that otherwise would exchange less or not at all in normal conditions. Since it would be a tailored and different training, when the majority of training needs can be met using online tools, this can be used as a team event. This out-of-routine practice can be proven useful to strengthen the team or to get to know better people who would have been working together for years but never met in person. Can be a landmark for a team-building practice.
Since tailored training might take several days and the class might be from different teams, it’s an opportunity to exchange on ways of working. Ideation can occur with people that never worked together before, with different perspectives on the company and different implementation strategies. Training can become an ongoing workshop to test ideas and discuss how to implement them even during the coffee and water breaks. Online sessions struggle to create these ties and links between people, especially if the participants don’t know each other.
Cost friendly
Hello dear manager! Yes, you read it right. The benefits written above can be made without significant investment. Tailored training is not much more expensive than old-school training. Some of the class training can be less expensive especially when divided by the number of participants, and realizing is less expensive than an individual license of an online platform. It depends greatly on the subject and methodology but is not a prohibitive practice. At all.
Of course, it can be more expensive than off-the-shelf training, but for the price difference and what you would get from the training, it might serve you better. But to be honest, if your organization is still doing off-the-shelf training offline, it would be more advantageous to go for online variants. The offline training shines when putting in the effort and making the event special.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur