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A few years ago, I spent an enjoyable morning sacking an older male worker. Then, armed only with GCSEs in biology and chemistry, I brushed up on my surgical skills by looking over the shoulder of a doctor in an operating theatre. It was easy enough. I didn’t even have to change into surgical scrubs.
It was pretty low stakes because I wasn’t, after all, actually forcing a man into redundancy or figuring out how to amputate a leg, but trying out the latest professional training development using virtual reality headsets.
New tech is often touted as the next big thing to hit training. Meta is one of the latest tech platforms to make the case for giving skills training a makeover, with the metaverse offering virtual and augmented reality in an immersive environment.
“The metaverse promises to make learning more active,” said Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, earlier this year. “With virtual and augmented reality technologies, people can learn by doing, not just passively absorbing information. This has the potential to transform the way we provide new skills and new life-long learning tools for people in the future.”
When I think back to my morning of sacking and surgery, the clincher was fiddling around with new gadgets rather than the content. A tech consultant once told me of a client who just wanted some whizzy new platform for their training modules to stop people falling asleep.
“That’s a pretty low bar,” he said. But then, much of corporate training, he pointed out, aims pretty low.
Skills training has something of a problem: it can be rather boring or, worse, pointless.
According to research by City and Guilds, a UK-based skills organisation, 59 per cent of employees found their training content was not “exciting or engaging”. Many also failed to see an impact on their career progression and performance at work, or an understanding of their sector and organisation.
That is unfortunate. In a recent blog post, Ryan Roslansky, chief executive of LinkedIn, wrote that the social media site’s research “shows that the skills sets for jobs have changed by around 25 per cent since 2015. By 2027, this number is expected to double. That means jobs are changing on you even if you aren’t changing jobs, just as business demands are changing on you even if you’re not changing your business.”
A report published last year by the Learning and Work Institute, a think-tank, argued that the UK risks “sleepwalking to stagnation in skills” because spending on training employees fell more than a quarter in real terms between 2005 and 2019, from £2,139 to £1,530 per year.
Ben Willmott, head of public policy at the CIPD, the professional body for HR and people development, points out that this decline in expenditure on workplace training signifies that skills investment is not seen as a priority in too many companies. “Boards and management teams can regard investment in the workforce as a cost to be managed down rather than a value driver that can boost innovation and performance,” he says.
Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning and Work Institute, says contextualisation is important, “making things relevant to people’s work life. You have to hook people in the first place then show why it’s relevant.”
In its report, the Learning and Work Institute noted that most investment in training tends to be informal, with “the wage costs to employers of staff while they are undertaking training . . . sometimes included in estimates of employer investment”.
While it might demonstrate relevance and context, I worry that there is also a laziness at play in such informal training. Since the pandemic eased, there has been a clamour for young people to return to the office because, it is said, they are losing out on opportunities for on-the-job training. But I reckon the value of this apprenticeship model is overstated. It leaves too much to chance, and overstates the wisdom of the person doing the training.
The pandemic forced some employers to think harder about the lessons they were trying to impart. I worry that some of this will be lost on the return to the office.