“If talking were teaching, we’d all be so smart we couldn’t take it”
In-house training always seems a good fit for initial issues and rapid turnaround after critical staff development needs are identified. The actual results fail early and often. While in-house training often does a great job of training in specific local processes, it’s often ineffective for increasing general mastery.
Teaching is a skill, and mastery of a job doesn’t necessarily provide it. Great lab people, logistics specialists, finance number crunchers, and domain knowledge experts are not necessarily good teachers. Even elite academic researchers aren’t necessarily great teachers – although they may create environments where a lot of learning goes on. The time, motivations, and efforts in academic learning environments are very different from enterprise production environments (even those in institutions and government offices).
Experience has shown that great technical people and highly efficient workers aren’t always great teachers in view of their ability to focus intensely on getting a specific task done. A great manufacturing production specialist might know a lot about the ERP screens they use every day but very little about the structure of the whole solution and how it works inside. ERP training for code developers, implementors, and users covers very different things. On-the-job task training can be very effective for the tasks done right now and fail miserably if anything (like new problems or shifts for agility) changes. The next post in the series lays out a few definitions of different types of training. You can find this and other similar articles at www.ekalore.com/hunt-for-talent
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