Training for…
Time is an interesting construct. There are times that I feel 85 years old, and there are times that I feel like a 14-year-old boy. I realized that I have been involved in training for over twenty years, which makes me feel 85 even saying that. I was twenty-five years old the first time I was introduced as an instructor for a class that people had paid for. We were doing swat team tactics for a week, and people had paid good money to learn from us. Not long after being introduced as one of the instructor cadre, a “seasoned” swat officer walked up and stared me in the face, and asked me how old I was. When I replied, “Twenty-five,” I could immediately see the doubt on his face when he told me he had been on a large metropolitan swat team in Oklahoma as long as I had been alive. He was undoubtedly questioning his and his team’s investment, and his face showed it. I replied, “Man, that’s amazing. I hope we all learn a lot this week.” At the end of the week, the man stuck his hand out to shake mine and thanked me for the training with a much different look on his face.
Twenty-Five years old and beginning a lifetime of training others to make the world more awesome. (I’m not sure the me now would trust this guy).
As I look back, I see my love of training started that week. In the years since, I have trained people how to perform Olympic lifts, preach sermons, eat a paleo diet, respond to active shooters, conduct strategic planning, have effective and healthy conflict, leadership development, and so much more. As I write this, I’m smiling because I see gifts and talents that I was given being used to help people grow and develop in a vast difference of fields.
While conducting research for my thesis, I was studying effective training methodology. If you want to improve something, you must have some way of measuring it at the start as well as after you’ve made changes. Dr. Minor, my professor, had told me that I should aim for 80-85% of my literature research to be within the last few years if I was academically looking to push advancement in the field. During the research, I saw references to academic work published in the 1970s in a few of the research articles I cited for my work, which caught my attention because of the conversations with my professor. In the 1970s, a training evaluation model circulated in academia, and I’m shocked I had never heard of it until November of 2023. Kirkpatrick’s model simply breaks training effectiveness down into four levels of measurable effectiveness.
As I reflect back on over twenty years of training, I really wish I would have known this. I truly think the beauty is the simplicity. Richard Rumelt (who I’ve been quoting a lot lately) explains expertise as making complex things simple and boldly states that “a hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity.” I imagine Rumelt loves or would love Kirkpatrick’s model.
As I reflect on this, the questions I’m asking are, “Shouldn’t we design training from results to reaction, and not the inverse?” I’m also asking if we’re taking enough time to really determine the results we need before building training. As I think back over all my training experience, I can see that I’m guilty of not spending enough time thinking about end results, but I’m changing and growing as I type.