The+Classroom+Environment+is+the+Best+way+to+conduct+Developmental+Training+for+Employees+of+Professional+Organizations

For this post I am making the assumption that people employed in a professional organization have received formal training either prior to employment or as a condition of employment. The term “professional organization” covers Corporate, Non-Profit, Governmental, Military and Educational organizations.

This is a trend I have observed in Military, Corporate, and Educational environments. Training that is meant to develop a skill is designed for the classroom and presented in a lecture mode where the individual presenting is either an “Expert” or is presenting their method on how they successfully accomplished something or solved an issue.

After the classroom training is complete employees are expected to apply what was presented in training in their respective jobs. There is no follow on training where employees are put into a training environment to apply what they learned in the developmental training session. How developmental training is designed is key to how employees apply it in their jobs and if they wil learn anything from it. If training needs to include a classroom portion then part of the design can include scenario-based training so employees can apply what they learned and have their own experiences in the training. Through this process employees will generate their own ideas, building upon the original idea presented in the classroom portion of training and learning something they can take back to their jobs.

Learning and development happens through experiences. Developmental training in any organization should be designed to provide a “Learning Experience”. In “Experiential Learning: experience as the source of learning and development” Kolb writes “Ideas are not fixed immutable elements of thought but are formed and re-formed through experience”

Dewey writes about learning from experience “To "learn from experience" is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from experiment in the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction- discovery of the connection of things.” And “An ounce experience is better than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and verifiable significance.”


 * __ Literary Resources: __**

Experiential Learning: experience as the source of learning and development- Kolb (1984)

Democracy and Education- John Dewey