Training for transformation

Why do we train? 

1. Are we training in order to make money for our training company?
2. Are we training because the funder has given us a mandate to train a specific number of people?
3. Are we training because we have heard that in training, you get rich quick?

It doesn’t matter which one of these is our main objective, there is only way to achieve it.

We have to produce quality.  To produce quality, we have to transfer skills and develop expertise that makes an impact on business, the economy and society. And also the tax man’s collections – by way of income tax and VAT.

This means that we have to follow the age old dictum: a trainer/ school is only as good as the achievements of its graduates.

Now that’s an intriguing prospect.  If we are developing skills then it is safe to assume that our graduates (skilled learners) will be working and therefore paying income tax in proportion to what they are wroth.  The more income tax they pay, the more they earn.  The more they earn, the better they are applying what we taught them.

But we can only measure this in the long term.  And that’s what OBET and SAQA are all about – long term development.  You can only claim to developing people when you have proved that they have made a social impact after a year or two.

This is standard OBET practice.

After 50 years, OBET still follows the Kirkpatrick four-stage model of evaluation:

So let’s go back to the beginning.  Why are we training?  Many funded organisations and government train to quotas.  The train, assess, dump the learners and just report the trained numbers in their annual report.  It makes them feel good, and it makes the funder feel good.  Everyone’s happy except the learner, who has been trained, and had her aspirations raised only to find unemployment.

This is the worst form of hypocrisy.

Then there are the trainers who claim, “All our students got jobs.”  They did?  And for how long? And how did they progress?

Once again, the profits rolled into the trainer’s coffers, he has reported a 100% success rate, and everyone’s happy except the poor learner, who was dumped into a job for which she was not suited, and which came to an end after three months anyway.

This is the second worst form of hypocrisy.

You won’t find this sort of hypocrisy in business.  Business trains to get results, and to achieve increased productivity in the workplace.  In business, training managers are required to track training right through to Return on Investment (ROI).

Why doesn’t it happen everywhere else?

Because there’s no one to stop it, and as I pointed out earlier, everyone’s happy expect the learner.  “They have no voice anyway, so they have nothing damaging to say about me.”

OBET is different from the old ways of training – it is LEARNER CENTRED and not TEACHER CENTRED.

If we are learner centred, we will follow the learner (as a legitimate part of the cost of training) all the way through to a long term measurement of ROI.

It we are teacher centred, then we are in it for the kudos, the bucks and the feel-good.

It’s only if we are learner-centred that we will be training for transformation, and can sleep peacefully at night knowing that we have actually managed to something good.

Like helping to transform South Africa, and not the house’s interior décor.