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The term 'iceberg of ignorance' is a well-known business metaphor offered by Sidney Yoshida c1989 relating to a lack of management awareness on the company's front line.
I believe there's an iceberg of ignorance around training that is somewhat obfuscated by a standard training model and what I'd describe as 'conventional wisdom'.
Ever since I can remember, Kirkpatrick's Evaluation Model of Training has been the tried and tested method of evaluating training effectiveness. At first glance, you can see that Kirkpatrick's formula has credence. For many years, I've talked about it in the classroom, in interviews, in articles like this, and at conferences.
Occasionally, students have contacted me saying that they'd like to attend one of our specialist courses, but their training manager said there was no training budget. So, I'd talk them through Kirkpatrick and urge them to apply the formula in the context of their own learning success.
However, there is increasing awareness that Kirkpatrick's model neither mentions nor addresses other issues related to training effectiveness, and everybody in business and training should know their ROI on training investment.
Early during the COVID lockdown, a former company commissioned me to do an audit of 'Training Effectiveness'. This involved devising a survey for all staff who had attended formal external training courses during the previous twelve months. The post-survey interviews revealed some interesting insights about issues and obstacles to learning preparedness and effectiveness. What became increasingly clear was that there are substantial issues outside of the classroom, pre-class, and post-class that can act as barriers to training success.
And those issues will be the subject of the next two articles.
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