Does training for business professionals still pose new challenges?
The challenges are the classic ones, the ways of overcoming them evolve. The main challenge of behavioral training is for participants to integrate what they learn in training into their professional lives. In the first month they are very excited about the change but then they start to fade and end up returning to old habits. The reasons for this typical phenomenon are varied and range from natural inertia towards change, lack of follow-up and demotivation due to lack of challenge, autonomy, recognition or focus.
To whom are these challenges posed, more to business professionals, to those in charge or to trainers? And to what extent?
To overcome these challenges, everyone has to contribute.
Trainers have to create different actions that go far beyond classroom training, those responsible have to become more involved in monitoring and participants have to move from a passive attitude towards training to a proactive attitude.
How do you conceive an environment in your institution that you consider conducive to training, interesting for professionals, profitable for companies, challenging for everyone?
To create this environment, it is necessary to stimulate motivation, autonomy and monitoring, and for this we have several approaches.
One approach we take that increases motivation is that of Timothy Gallwey described in his book “The Inner Game of Work”. In this approach, we do not insist on training so that participants conform to what is defined, on the assumption that they lack knowledge.
On the contrary, we assume that if the participants reduce some internal interferences (such as fears and self-doubt), they will reveal more natural abilities to fulfill their functions, be they management, commercial or technical. In training we focus on reducing these internal obstacles and on the perception they have of their work and how to make it more interesting.
Another interconnected approach is to encourage an active and autonomous learning attitude. For this, in the training, each participant creates an action plan that he will implement.
Finally, we monitor this plan through coaching, follow-up training or online monitoring with various e-learning tools and 360º evolution assessments.
In this way, training becomes a real challenge for everyone, as its true impact is clearly visible.
Isabel Freire de Andrade | Partner at Bright Concept
(Translated to English)