You can call me a victim of training. It just so happened that for his working biography, due to all kinds of seminars, trainings and other coaching sessions, he has long exceeded a hundred. I can say that not all of the educational courses I took were useful, interesting and important. Some of them were actually harmful.
What motivation do HRs have to teach you something?
I don’t know who told HR that if something doesn’t work out for a person at work, it’s because of a lack of knowledge. There can be many reasons: internal processes in the company, hidden motivation within the team, the objective situation on the market. Wagon and small cart options. But sooner or later, from somewhere, an idea about the life-giving power of new knowledge appears. And now dozens of managers are rushing indoors in search of the holy grail. All these amphitheater meetings, flipcharts, presentations, motivational speeches, case studies, brainstorming sessions, carry absolutely nothing. Time Eaters. I remember once I had a chance to attend three workshops with the same agenda. It’s just that the person who organized them lived in the paradigm: “Bored and lonely? Get a meeting!" And so dozens of usually busy people gathered in corporate meetings, discussed something furiously, and then dispersed without visible results. And what is most striking, after a while, everything repeated. Just like in the movie Groundhog Day. No argument in favor of a waste of time worked. No consolidation of the results of group work, no visible consequences, nothing. Process for the sake of process. Needless to say, it cost the company money? Rental of premises, coffee breaks, payment for travel and accommodation for employees from other cities. And so several times in a row and only one, not the largest unit. The company where I used to work had dozens of them.
So why all this? The first is planning. In a large company, the budget is usually built a year in advance. And if according to the schedule you have 256 events, then exactly as many of them will be, otherwise next year you, as a budget holder, are threatened with “cutting off” in pieces and money.
Another motive for organizing corporate training is leadership. If the boss studied in a Soviet school, then Lenin's "Study, study and study again!" firmly ingrained in his brain. This quote, by the way, has an informal continuation: “Study, study, study is better than work, work, work!”.
I don’t want you to form a misperception of this publication, saying that the author is against education, as such, it’s just that if the educational process is uncontested, forced and thoughtless, miracles cannot be expected.
Infogypsy ordered?
Every time I receive an invitation to attend another training, I remember a funny parable.
Some guy drives up to a shepherd tending a flock of sheep in a car, leans out of the window and says:
“If I tell you how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”
A slightly surprised shepherd replies:
“Of course, why not.
Then this guy takes out a laptop, connects it to a mobile phone, connects to the Internet, goes to the NASA website, selects a GPS satellite connection, finds out the exact coordinates of the place where he is, and sends them to another NASA satellite, which scans this area and gives high resolution photo. Then this type sends the picture to one of the laboratories in Hamburg, which after a few seconds sends him a soap with confirmation that the picture has been processed and the received data is stored in the database. Through ODBC, it connects to the MS-SQL database, copies the data to an EXCEL table, and starts calculating. In a few minutes he gets the result and prints out 150 pages in color on his miniature printer. Finally he says to the shepherd:
— You have 1586 sheep in your herd.
- Exactly! That's how many sheep I have in my herd. Well, choose.
The man chooses one and loads it into the trunk. And then the shepherd said to him:
“Listen, if I guess who you are, will you return it to me?”
After a little thought, the man says:
- Come on.
“You work as a consultant,” the shepherd unexpectedly gives out.
"It's true, damn it!" And how did you guess?
“It was easy to do,” the shepherd says, “you showed up when no one called you, you want to get paid for answering a question that I already know, to a question that no one asked you, and besides, you don’t know a damn thing about my work. So give my dog back.
No matter how ridiculous, but the percentage of experts who talk about a subject in which they understand absolutely nothing is much more than truly highly professional specialists. I am convinced of this quite often. Elementary clarifying questions, beyond the scope of the stated topic, can confuse speakers. Moreover, most often this occurs at seminars on a wide range of topics: "Innovative Marketing", "Digital in the context of digitalization, etc." When it comes to application topics "backend", "frontend" or C #, such stories are rare.
I will teach you how to live...
In addition to classic educational seminars, a few years ago, large companies became interested in personal growth trainings and all kinds of life spring technologies. In places it seemed that fish were being launched into your brains and you were starting to lose touch with reality. I confess that even I, who is usually skeptical of all kinds of manipulations, sometimes had “differences”. The technology is understandable, you are emotionally swayed, shackled by group responsibility and obligations, and then immersed in uncomfortable training conditions. As a result, the brain melts, values shift, and ambitious corporate pledges of allegiance are made. It is as if the Stakhanovites were hypnotized and asked to go out into outer space for tomorrow.
There is such an old joke:
- What's your name boy?
- Lech!!!
- And who do you want to become?
- Astronaut!!!
- Why an astronaut?
- Leha!
In other words, corporate mantras usually don't give much room for maneuver. He sat on a horse and "Alga!" (kaz. Alga - forward).
The most difficult thing was for familiar IT specialists. Whether you noticed or not, but usually people with structured thinking, with a formed system of values and views work in IT. And imagine that you, such an independent, authoritative and accomplished professional, are suddenly publicly declassed and tried “weakly”. It is extremely difficult not to become a victim of manipulation in this situation, especially if everyone is sitting with their heads bowed in this ill-fated training circle, without sleep and rest for the second day. In addition to the emotional load, anxiety for the future is also added, since usually leaders of different levels, temperaments and ambitions are selected into the group. Not to break loose and not lose your head in this race for common sense is not at all easy. People really, as a result of such exercises, changed jobs, left families, began to do strange things. For example, they quit their jobs for the sake of painting or knitting. I do not think that the company set such goals for itself when it carried out such educational projects at corporate expense.
For what…
At one of the past trainings, a respected person said: “It would be nice every time before you start something important, you ask yourself the question: - What for?”. And you know, I agree with him. When you yourself offer to send you to this or that educational course, seminar, conference, you usually understand why you need it. Or so you think. In the case when the company decides this for you, it would be good to have in mind the answer to the question: “To what?”. Otherwise, it's time and money thrown to the wind. What do you think?
instead of an epilogue
- Hello! We are starting a seminar "How to earn a million rubles in one day." Question to the audience. How much did the seminar ticket cost?
- Thousand rubles.
How many seats are in this room?
- Thousand.
Thank you, the seminar is over.
Source: habr.com