Eat your greens!

"I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it"
Harry S Truman

Some time ago a posting appeared on a daily email list I subscribe to, something like:

"Help! Can anyone suggest how I can get the line managers in my company to release their staff for more than a half-day training session on assertiveness?"

I promptly sent in a three word response, but don't know to this day whether it was a spoof or a genuine request. Alas, it seemed all too probably genuine, as the list has a large proportion of contributors who make similar requests:
"Can anyone give me for free the advantage of all their years of accumulated knowledge and experience on how to set up and run a small training business, and some free materials would be nice too, as I have no idea how to deliver this contract I have, however improbably, just managed to win and incidentally, could you share your mailing lists with me?"

Anyway, my current growl of dissatisfaction was awoken by one of those contributors recently, who was complaining that their clients didn't seem very interested in the evaluation of their training and asking the list how could these awful customers could be persuaded that evaluation is good for them.

We trainers really are a damn odd lot, aren't we? In the real world one researches and pilots a product or service, then when there is some idea of the likely market for it, a decision on whether to go ahead with the development and the launch is made. In the real world businesses do not try and flog products and services that they have been told time and again the customers don't want. They don't say, "Here is my product, I know you keep saying you don't want it, but I really think you should buy it, (and if you don't I'll whine to all my mates about how stupid you are)"

Many trainers (I must be mellowing in my oldish age, that originally just read "Trainers") fail to see the other side of the coin. Heaven knows, I've been in a few trainers' gripe sessions myself. You know the ones, sitting round the lounge, coffee in hand, old copy of some glossy but usually unopened magazine from a professional institute in Wimbledon, open to display the page with their letter, when someone says, apropos of a recent telephone conversation, "... and do you know, they ONLY wanted me to cut it down to a TWO AND A HALF DAY programme!" (Gasps all round. "They DIDN?T!" "I hope you TOLD them!", "Oh, HONestly!" etc. from the audience).
As a younger independent training freelancer, I was once similarly naïve. Settling down with my partner to plan our business offering, we decided that a Training Needs Analysis was essential. So we added to the first printing of the leaflet "Pachyderm Training will always carry out a Training Needs Analysis before quoting a full programme price". Guess what? Not a single customer. Later we amended that to something along the lines of "Ideally, we would like to carry out a training needs analysis .. " We never did carry out a paid-for training needs analysis. And we certainly never got asked to evaluate. But we stayed in business.