Education, Training, and Indoctrination
Observations on corporate training and its purpose
I was recently working on a project in which we introduced a new piece of information management software to the business. This software is not special in any way, but it is meant to fundamentally change the way the organisation shares information.
About a year into the project, my group were discussing an initial release and the needs for it. As part of the discussion, the need for “training” came up, to help users understand how to use the software. What struck me was that there were three different descriptions of what would be needed, and therefore three different timelines and costs implied for the development of the training.
- Manager: We don’t have time to create training. Creating a full curriculum getting it approved by the organisation, and ensuring it aligns with both corporate objectives and existing legal statements takes months. Video production adds months more to that and certification of completion adds months more to that.
- Colleague: We don’t need any training, the user manual provided by the vendor is very complete. We have taken the courses offered by the vendor and will be able to do the work for them.
- Me: We already have (rudimentary) training documents in the form of Use Cases or User Stories. They already narrate the basic usage of the system and simply need to be reformatted to act as a simple task-driven PlayBook for the users to get them up and running.
These are three wildly different narratives associated with the same question.
From my perspective, it was absolutely necessary to release for our users to begin seeing the benefits of the system, delaying it for years just to get an online training system constructed by our internal training department reduced the value to the organisation. On the other hand, I could absolutely see how offering nothing but the (very technical) vendor manual was only going to take time out of already busy schedules, creating negative associations, creating poor uptake of the platform.
At the time I was very frustrated with the response, the different takes on what was needed resulted in a blockage of progress.
Recently, I began to comprehend where the variance in perceived need was stemming from. It was actually a difference in perception of why training material is produced:
- Education
- Training
- Indoctrination
All three of these have value to an organisation, and all three are (partially) achieved through what is called “training material”. Further, all “training material” has a certain amount of each of the purposes when it is produced. Clarifying the primary objective of a particular training initiative may help in producing the material.
Distinguishing Between the Dimensions
It is common to call for “Corporate Training” within business development discussions. The need for training is stated to overcome barriers to work, resistance to change, and increased performance (lessonly). That is not a complete list but is representative of each of our dimensions of learning material.
Training
- Mechanical Skillsets
- Safety
- Basic Operations
- easily quantifiable
Education
- Transferable skills
- Predictive Reasoning
- Hypothesis forming
- Quality-based, difficult to quantify
Training can be distinguished from Education, by its focus on immediate action, and less on future possibilities.
Indoctrination
- Team building
- Resistance to Change
- Quantifiable, but little value in quantifying (acceptance is all that is required)
“Every culture institutionalizes certain forms of behaviour that communicate and encourage certain forms of thinking and acting, thus moulding the character of its citizens” (Merloo, “The Rape of the Mind”, 1956)
I remember starting a new role at a new company and being told to report to a training centre on my first day. It was a corporate training event on basic C# development. Most of the skills were ones I had mastered a decade before, but it was nice to get the refresher and it was certainly more interesting than ITIL Fundamentals (the week before).
I was surprised when most people showed no interest in the content of the material being presented. Rather goofing off, and spending more time having extended lunches. I later learned that, of the two dozen people there, only three were actual developers; the rest were comprised of Business Analysts of varying stripes.
The point was not to teach a new skill.
The Developers already knew how to program in C#, and the Analysts were forbidden from ever using the skill anyway.
This was a team-building exercise.
Placing people in a room together and having them solve common problems creates a sense of solidarity. The problem to be solved is kind of irrelevant, but simply must engage the audience sufficiently to motivate them to solve it, you may as well learn a semi-useful skill while you are at it.
Similar to this concept is that of informing employees what to think.
It is important to organisations that people be loyal, or obedient, to the organisation. Part of this obedience is knowing what the organisational decision is.
I am reminded of a business trip in which a vigorous debate occurred regarding the implementation of a testing framework for our software product. I spent the first three days travelling with my colleagues and using the opportunity to suggest what the automation around testing should look like. My colleagues all agreed, and we were well on our way to implementation. On the third day, our executive showed up and, during a few beers after the daily meetings, informed us that he was going to have to get us trained because none of us knew how to test his software system.
That was it, all testing was manually performed via bash from that day forward (at least until the day I left).
Many decisions that require consensus are actually decided independently at the executive level. These decisions must then be disseminated to employees to ensure they behave and decide in a manner consistent with organisational expectations.
In this context, training is used to ensure that decisions made at the operational level are consistent with the expectations set at the executive level.
Assuming individuals have the best interests of the organisation in play, they may disagree with the best way to achieve organizational objectives. Some form of consensus must be achieved. Most often this consensus is achieved at the executive level and disseminated organisationally. Informing employees what the appropriate solution to problems is can be achieved by sending them to training in those solutions. This makes it clear to staff that this is a “good” solution or a “socially acceptable” solution within the organisation.
Merloo refers to this process as Mass Conditioning and it can be thought of as corporate propaganda. This is a core component of Change Management in that employees must be convinced to adopt new and improved business practices.
Not Mutually Exclusive
Having identified all three of the purposes behind initiating training, it is important to recognise that they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, all three are present in all training material.
All efforts to learn must pass through a guided portion. The part where are given the elementary components of information. These elementary components are drilled into us through constant repetition (à la “Elementary School”). Later we undertake an effort of higher understanding by understanding how the elementary components relate to one another (à la “High School”).
It is fundamentally necessary to know the parts to understand how they fit together.
This represents a natural progression and results in the earlier parts simply being drilled into us through repetition (training), with later learning being a more complex internal understanding of relationships through reflection and introspection. This flow is defined in the Stages of Self-Directed Learning.
Throughout the entire process, from basic drilling of skills to deeper comprehension, we are subjected to the biases and opinions that surround us: early on through our teachers, and later through ourselves and our peers. In all cases, these biases are necessary to convey that the material being presented is of sufficient value to pay attention to. This is a minimal level of indoctrination: you must believe the subject is important.
These three dimensions of the learning material emphasise different objectives and outcomes, and correspond to the stages of learning:
- [Training/Directed] As a volunteer firefighter, with a full-time job elsewhere, I only needed to learn the mechanical operations of “putting the wet stuff on the hot stuff” (as one instructor put it).
- [Education/Self-Directed] The Chief of our Firehall had a full-time job as the regional fire investigator. A deep understanding of the mechanics of fire and accelerants was necessary for him to interpret smoke patterns on a wall (fascinating discussions after the weekly skills practice and meeting)
- [Indoctrination/Pre-Directed] Both the Chief and I spent a lot of time doing demonstrations of basic fire safety to the public. Generally, we were encouraging people to take the risks of fire seriously in their own homes.
BTW: always keep multiple fire extinguishers in sensible places in your house
While they are not mutually exclusive, understanding how they differ can assist in using them appropriately. The first and most obvious signal as to the type of training material you are proposing is the length of time the consumer is engaged with the information.
- Education: a single educational event can take weeks or months
- Training: a single training objective may be achieved in days.
- Indoctrination is measured in hours
If you are asked to attend an hour-long presentation to demonstrate a new way of doing things, you are likely receiving indoctrination in which you are informed of what the new policy is. This can be confirmed by the seniority of the presenter. If it is a brief presentation, by very senior members, it is indoctrination. This is appropriate for situations such as the merging of departments where executives must inform the now-merged groups that they are to work together. It is not to be met with questioning, or understanding, just acceptance.
If you attend a day or week-long training session, you are being directed to learn how to accurately perform a specific task. The first part of this is to be convinced that what you are learning is meaningful (indoctrination). This could range from the appropriate way to fill in a tax form, the correct method for donning safety gear, or safe methods for transferring bacterial samples. The key is that there is a correct method you are to apply, and you should walk away from the training able to demonstrate (and therefore implement) these best practices.
Education is self-directed and takes a long time. Coming up with novel solutions requires considering alternatives, as well as having tried variations. Education in a domain allows people to be inventive and requires pre-existing training in the currently accepted techniques, but then uses experience and experimentation to take that knowledge further. This is the ostensible goal of post-secondary education. The point is to invent new techniques, or often, just to apply them in novel ways. This takes years, and sometimes decades.
Corporate Training
Understanding this interrelationship between the three purposes of learning, and understanding how easy it is to confuse them, we can spot a possible underlying cause of Education Inflation, where individuals are expected to have increasing levels of certification for the same level of work (for example a PhD to perform basic information analysis).
What employers are seeking are individuals capable of performing technical skills (training), but are under the illusion that higher credentials will mean more capability. This ignores the move toward more abstract thinking with greater credentials. As employers are looking for more training, education facilities focus more on training particular manual skills rather than engaging in higher-order thinking. This means that those with credentials are not expected to be as performant as the cycle continues.
This problem seems to be fundamentally caused by confusion regarding what the employer is looking for: trained doers of stuff or self-directed learners.
Employers would do well to consider what they are looking for (an implementer, a planner, or a cheerleader) when considering their educational and training requirements. Failure to do so can have negative consequences, mostly in the form of wasting time.
Failed Corporate Training
The end of the fiscal year approached and my directorate still had money in their training budget. My manager started asking us daily to fill in the training form for any training I might want because we have to use the money.
It’s end of year, I’m kind of busy ensuring some data transforms for audits work. I have seen some things in the code that I have not used before, or haven’t used in years, combine that with the critiques of peer code where my experience tells me they have room for improvement. So I am a little busy studying manuals and existing peer code.
They are really insistent because they don’t want me to loose the training opportunity to develop my career in a direction I would like.
I’m kind of busy learning. Keep the money, give the training to someone else.
They insists that I take advantage of the organizational training opportunities.
Fine, what courses would be of value to the organisation? What would the organisation like me to learn about.
Nope, the organisation wants employees to feel that we are getting the most out of our training as this is a proven way to retain staff. However, there is a class option that is being offered in 2 weeks that everyone else is signing up for that looks good.
Fine, sign me up for that.
Ohhh…. We will have to see if we can get permission to allow you to do that. We don’t want to leave ourselves short staffed … after some tough negotiating I got permission for you.
Sometimes I’m a little slow. This is the moment I noticed the pattern.
The organisation is not concerned with my career development. They are concerned with retention and loyalty, and mostly demonstrating key KPIs. That their staff is learning, is not of interest to the organisation, rather it is important that there are boxes, and the boxes are being checked. Further, spending money on an employee is often the only way to demonstrate appreciation: sending staff on an expensive course, is a way to lavish gifts on the employee (that’s why a show needs to be made of it being difficult)
It's weird, because I have actually helped develop the curriculum for this course in the past, as well as having received corporate training on the matter in the last year, and will not be using the skills any time soon.
Unclear training objectives created a situation where corporate finances, and people’s time, are being wasted. Like something out of a Dilbert comic (though I can’t find an actual one to link to)
Aside
Amusingly, my instructor, at some point mentioned that he has been “spending so much time in training” that he hasn’t really had “an opportunity to learn” about one of the detailed services he is teaching.
That says a lot.
Conclusion
It is not always evident what our objective is when we state we require “training”. When confusion arises within teams, it may be caused by having different objectives, with different timescales associated with them.
It is my hope, that these definitions may allow a given group to understand what they are seeking in their workplace: the goals your organization have for your classes may not be the same as your personal goals. Also dangerous is to select the wrong type of engagement for your objectives, or the wrong type of credentials.
- Training: learn a specific skill
- Education: self-learn a skill, or make new plans
- Indoctrination: disseminate approved solutions, or increase brand loyalty
Take time to understand why you are creating, consuming, or assigning material before taking the action. Take time to understand your organization’s objectives in getting you trained.
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