This is the second 'edition' of the introduction to Advanced Training Techniques to appear on this blog. It too adopts a Question-and-Answer format; in this case one question and three broad answers.
Question: Why the focus on advanced training techniques?
Answer: First of all, training is a key pillar of investment in human resource. Alternatively, it can be viewed as a key function of management, the other functions being: Directing (Leading), Coordinating, Motivating, Planning, Recruiting and Procuring.
A widely acknowledged and oft stated point in management and development circles -- stated to the point of turning an important notion into a cliche -- is that people are the most valuable resources [or ‘assets’] that an organization, community or society has. Indeed, it is this value to society which people represent that gave currency, in the Sixties, to the term Human Capital. This was later widely replaced by the term HR; and now HRM and HRD are among the most commonly used acronyms around.
If HR are so valuable, it follows that we must invest in them quite deliberately in order to maximize their potential. Certainly, we shouldn’t let HR go to waste or lie idle. We can invest in HR in a number of ways: We can improve on nutrition, or ensure first and foremost that there is enough of basic food requirements to go around. We can invest in health: child, public, occupational and the like. We can provide adequate or improved shelter. We can provide requisite security. We can recruit people into into specific 'jobs' or roles in our various organizations and enterprises. And we can allow or facilitate HR migration to elsewhere: from rural to urban or other rural areas; from one country to neighboring ones, or overseas. Above all, perhaps, we can educate and train people – and employ them.
It can generally be said that we train people in order to make them more productive, but the reality of training is more complicated than that. There is obviously societal need to operate more seamlessly, more predictably and more optimally. In a word, the need to make society operate as though it were a healthy, robust and clearly purposeful organism.
Thus, secondly, if we opt to educate and train, we are compelled to decide how best to do so; and to do so we must (a) explore how humans learn -- i.e. the nature of learning, or how Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices (skills, competences and competencies) are learned and acquired; (b) interrogate the various ways in which training is (or should be) effectively conducted and the trainer’s/facilitator’s role is (or should be) construed or constructed; and, (c) discover ways in which humans can be made to learn or train more effectively. We are compelled, in other words, to examine the various training techniques to decide which ones are most appropriate in/to given situations -- for the learners and for the sponsoring entities.
So discovering and implementing those ways is the broad purpose of this course. It is “Advanced” because we seek to go beyond mere descriptions of form (of categories and types of training techniques) in order to look in some detail at content (the ‘how tos’ of specific techniques) and method; and because we seek to look into the interplay between theory and method in a broad TOT context.
Third: One of the greatest challenges confronting trainers, facilitators and the institutions or organizations which they serve is the actual or perceived gap between the skills supplied and those actually demanded by diverse segments of national or global labour markets. There is, it is argued, a skills gap which hampers employers' capacity to optimize available opportunities. All the blame for this is directed toward universities, in particular, and other educational or training institutions. Potential employers despair and cry foul, faced with what they see as waves, year after year, of graduates armed only with theoretical knowledge and hollow paper qualifications. And yet institutional training on a mass scale cannot have degree or diploma programmes tailor-made for the very specific skill-needs of every employer (extant or still to come) in every sector of an economy. Employers demand a targeted approach to training, and demand it, as if they didn't know, of institutions hard-wired for the shotgun approach to skill-building (which delivers competence to a far greater degree than it can mould competency); institutions too timid to offer a robust corporate responses to such accusations -- which are largely sanctimonious and self-flattering. "So, what's one to do to make progress?" That's one of the tough questions we will have to wrestle with.
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We will, as we move along, encounter many training techniques (or methods) in this course – over 35 (thirty five) in fact. However, there is frequently close interweaving among apparently dissimilar (or disparate) techniques or sets/clusters of them. Indeed, it has been argued that, in practice, training techniques have been “adapted and combined in an almost infinite variety of ways”; and “even the most widely used and well-known” techniques “show wide variation in use depending on factors [external to the techniques themselves] such as instructors and trainees involved and the task being learned” (Arnold, Robertson and Cooper, 1996: 254).
Among these best-known techniques are: Lectures, Case Studies, Demonstration and Practice (Arnold, Robertson and Cooper, 1996: 254). Lectures, such as today’s. Case Studies, such as Harvard Business School is famous for. Demonstrations, as in Mke Nyumbani, but not as in the demonstrations that the students of the University of Nairobi “have been known” for. And Practice, as in the learning by doing that is characteristic of apprentice training, on the job training, delegation, assignment, extension workers demonstrations, teaching practice, doctors’ internship or lawyers’ pupilage, high school laboratory work, and so on.
Other well-known techniques not immediately related to the above are: Classroom Instruction, Coaching (though many observes do not take it as such, for example the football coach – who is only supposed to win matches), Use of Audio-Visual Methods, Games and Meetings of various kinds.
There is a very strong TOT (Training of Trainers) element in this course. How does the TOT approach come in? This question is addressed at various points in the course, if often obliquely. But, very briefly, the answer to that question is as follows: The course will deliver K and, hopefully (directly and indirectly), an enhanced or reconfigured set A – which should lead to (translate into) enhanced P. The same process should cascade to the trainees you will subsequently train. We know we are training experts – even champions. But we also want to have a multiplier effect. This can best be achieved via a TOT format.
END OF ANSWER
Human Behaviour in the Workplace. New Delhi: Macmillan India.
