The plumber and the hammer

By about 3.00 their eyelids were getting very heavy indeed. It wasn’t that I’d bored them to tears. I looked around the group. Julie was wilting, and I suspected behind that hand-on-forehead was at least one closed eye. Martin had said nothing for a good twenty minutes. Sam had twice done that head jerk when you just snatch yourself back from the edge of sleep. The double espresso shot in my coffee had just about held its own, and I knew I would pay for the caffeine later. There was a pause, and I decided.

“Right”, I said firmly, “That’s enough. We’re all losing it. Time to pack in. I’ll see you at the same time next week”. And we all wearily but gladly packed up, about two hours short of the “full day”. I felt no guilt, but as I drove home I had to have that discussion in my head. You know the one. The one about explaining why you didn’t “do a full day”.

Time without number I have had THAT telephone conversation before a programme with a company training buyer. It goes like this.

Me: “ So, a six hour day with breaks then, finishing about ……………..”
Buyer: “Oh, no! OUR people are used to hard work.” [Meaning – “I’m paying you a DAY rate!”]
Me: “Yes, six is about as much ……………”
Buyer: “No, no. The works start at 8.30, half an hour for lunch, and the normal end of the day is five. They aren’t afraid of hard work !” [Meaning “That’s a lower cost per hour – you don’t get me like that!”]
Me: “But ……………..”
Buyer: “Right. See you on Tuesday!” [Meaning “That showed HIM!”]

The problem, and the one so many training buyers are clearly too money obsessed to understand, is that they cannot expect people, most of whom probably haven’t been in a training room for years, to endure or benefit from a sudden eight hours of intensive training. The system – and the brain - just can’t take it. Even if they can physically endure it, they won’t retain much. It’s like pouring water into a jug – when it’s full, it’s full. The rest goes down the drain. Human beings have a capacity too.

Over the years “the market” has forced we trainers to make many compromises, but at some stage we have to point out the consequences. You cannot condense a five day open programme into a four day in-company programme, which due to work pressures becomes reduced to three days, without actually losing anything. Learning isn’t like filling the petrol tank – you can’t employ a sort of grand prix pit-stop high pressure fuel pump. It takes Time. Time. It’s a relational thing. The brain has to process knowledge. Attitudes have to form. Mental connections have to be made. Existing knowledge has to be analogised into the new stuff. It just does take time.

The preposterous nonsense of “two year degrees” shows stupidity of an Olympic-winning quality . First the government destroyed a perfectly good employer-backed polytechnic regime where diplomas and sandwich courses provided the right learning in the right way over an appropriate period. Then school leavers (who would have done well under polytechnic education) were obliged to go to universities for “academic” (excuse me while I deal with this furball in my throat) “degrees” which on the whole employers didn’t ask for or even want. Then government saddled young graduates with huge debts on a promise of earning £400,000 more over their career. Then, discovering that the earnings benefit had suddenly (oh REALLY? ) dropped to only £150,000, the government proposed “two year degrees”. That response is absolutely sweet Fanny Adams to do with education. It’s all about money, political fallout, and gross ignorance of how learning works.

As is this too common obsession with a “normal training day” . For heavens sake, why can’t training buyers work out that they are not paying for how long people sit in a room, but for what training achieves ? Look, buyers, if you really want to achieve less for your money, then fine, we can deliver. Just stick us in overheated mezzanine training rooms under artificial light for three intensive days with ten trainees who haven’t had to do brain work since school. Do it because for some cretinous cost-obsessed reason you think that people being trained have to “work a normal day”.

And look up the story about the plumber and the hammer.