On Time and Training

In a recent post on his FRACAT (Free Resume and Career Toolbox) blog - http://www.fracat.com/index.html - Dan Sweet commented that he talked to a lot of job candidates who complained that their employer had not offered any training.

Dan's experience fits with my own. However, and as Dan said, it is up to the individual to make sure that their skills are current. So that started me wondering why individuals had so much trouble in defining personal education and training programs..

Time pressures are an obvious problem. Unless compelled to do so, we all tend to put our own training and personal development in the important but not urgent basket. Cash is another issue, although an enormous amount of material is available for free. But beyond this, I wonder if the problem simply is that people do not know how to develop their own training program?

It seems to me that many of us get locked into a triangle made up of formal qualification courses at one apex, generally short course corporate offerings at the second and, in some cases, continuing professional development requirements at the third.

The difficulty with this lock-in, at least as I see it, is that it ignores the single most important thing, the individual's real training needs. These may or may not fit within the triangle. So we have to start by defining those needs before we can define the required training program

However, this leads us straight back to the core problem in that many people have great difficulty in defining their training needs and hence in defining the training required to meet those needs.

I will return to this issue in my next post, looking at ways in which individuals can in fact plan to meet their own training needs.