TMG Training

About TMG Training

The training industry has built an elaborate apparatus around the delivery of learning and a very thin one around whether any of it survives contact with a Tuesday morning. That imbalance is not accidental.

There is a moment at the end of a well run training session when the room feels different from how it felt at nine in the morning. People are talking to each other. Somebody has had an idea they want to try. The facilitator is being thanked. It is a genuinely pleasant moment, and it is also the moment at which the overwhelming majority of training evaluation takes place. A form is handed out, or a link is sent, and the participants record how they feel while they are still feeling it. The data collected at that point is real data about something, but the something is not whether the training will change any behaviour at work. It is a measure of the experience of being trained.

Three weeks later the picture is different and nobody is looking at it. The participant has returned to a workload that did not pause while they were away. The new approach they were shown requires a form that does not exist yet, or a conversation with a colleague who was not in the room, or simply more time on a first attempt than the old way takes on the hundredth. Under those conditions the old way wins, not because the person is lazy or the training was bad, but because the old way is available and the new one is not. The skill has not been lost. It has been shelved.

Capability at the end of a course and behaviour at work three weeks later are two different things, and the industry routinely treats them as one.

Whether somebody had any say in attending is one of the more reliable signals about what will happen afterwards.

Sessions that rehearse a clean scenario prepare people for a situation that does not occur at work.

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