In the above video, Sean Bengry, makes a case for a change to how corporate training is being done. He argues for allowing corporate training to be more similar to how you do your personal SDL.
Corporate training budgets have been hit hard by the recent recessions and it is unlikely that training budgets will ever return to pre-recessionary spending. Offering classroom training is expensive, time consuming and does not always transfer to a real world setting.
“A recent training session I attended was for two days and the most useful information for me could have been covered in the space of an hour. I was away from my office, so there was a cost of lost time and the bulk of what I was learning was not useful to me or the job I was doing. The course cost hundreds of dollars. It was a waste of time and money for the company.”
– B. Spehar
Such large training sessions, delivered to diverse audiences, result in each participant only absorbing a small fraction of what is being delivered by the trainer. Allowing each employee to explore the material on their own, and to only study material that is relevant their role, is clearly much more efficient.
While many companies have invested heavily in self-paced learning tools (ie. LMS, etc), these tools may not have been used in ways that promoted SDL. Instead, the content of the generalized training sessions was simply translated into the newer, electronic format and presented using the newer tools (resulting in the same frustrations).
One of the strengths of SDL in corporate training lies in its flexibility and adaptability. Learners have the ability to ensure that the material they study is relevant to them, and can thus avoid costly and time-consuming training sessions.