21st Century Training

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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To people of my generation (and I’m not that old), training constitutes sitting in a classroom listening to the instructor, looking at PowerPoint and undertaking exercises that involve flip charts and yellow sticky notes. That’s still a valuable part of the training experience--I’ll freely admit that I teach that kind of training--so I obviously feel that it delivers value for money. However, there are many other forms of training available today, and in order to maximize the return on your training dollars--whether personal or for an entire department--you need to leverage each of the various training modalities.

Training options
Traditional classroom training still makes up a large part of the industry, and I don’t see it going away any time soon--it’s far too successful at achieving the goals. However, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to take people out of the office for several days at a time, and even if people are physically removed they aren’t necessarily mentally removed--they are connected to the office by smart phones, they have to step out for urgent phone calls or for scheduled conference calls, etc. As a result, there is a demand for alternative approaches to delivering training.

The logical first step is to take the traditional multi-day training course and break it into smaller chunks--instead of a week-…

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