Training and development

Based on Wikipedia: Training and development

In the Antebellum South, journals marketed to enslavers published articles about how to train people. Let that sink in for a moment. The field we now call "corporate training" has roots that stretch back not just to ancient civilizations, but through some of the darkest chapters of human history. Booker T. Washington, the pioneering African American educator who rose from slavery, would later write extensively about training philosophies—transforming a tool of oppression into one of liberation.

This uncomfortable origin story reveals something essential about training and development: it has always been about power. Who gets trained, in what, and toward what ends—these questions have shaped economies, defined social mobility, and determined which societies flourish.

The Difference That Isn't Really a Difference

Technically, training and development mean different things. Training focuses on immediate changes—teaching someone a specific skill they can use right now. Development plays the long game, shaping employees and organizations over years toward broader goals.

In practice? Everyone uses these terms interchangeably.

This linguistic sloppiness actually tells us something important. Organizations struggle to separate the immediate from the strategic. When a company sends a manager to a leadership workshop, is that training or development? When a software engineer learns a new programming language, are they being trained for today's project or developed for tomorrow's challenges? The answer is usually both.

The field itself has wandered between disciplines like a graduate student changing majors. It started in adult education and applied psychology. Then it drifted toward human resources management. Now it touches talent management, instructional design, human factors research, and knowledge management. This interdisciplinary homelessness means training professionals often don't know which academic journals to read or which conferences to attend.

Germany Gets It. America Doesn't.

Here's a striking contrast that explains a lot about modern economies.

Germany has built an elaborate vocational training system. Young Germans can enter apprenticeships that combine classroom learning with hands-on experience, emerging years later as skilled tradespeople with respected credentials. The system is so embedded in German culture that companies compete to offer apprenticeship slots, viewing them as investments rather than expenses.

The United States and United Kingdom? Their systems are generally considered weak. The college-or-bust mentality means vocational training carries stigma. Trade skills are often learned informally, inconsistently, or not at all. The result is a persistent skilled-worker shortage in both countries, even during periods of high unemployment.

This isn't just an economic issue. It's a statement about what societies value. Germany treats skilled trades as professions deserving rigorous preparation. Anglo-American cultures often treat them as fallback options for people who couldn't succeed in traditional academics.

A Century of Learning How to Learn

The academic study of training is surprisingly young. The first training-related article in a psychology journal appeared in 1918, exploring how to design university courses for applied psychologists. For the next four decades, the field mostly consisted of practitioners trying things and seeing what worked—trial and error dressed up as professional practice.

The 1960s and 70s changed everything. Researchers started developing actual theories about how adults learn and how organizations change. They began conducting studies to test these theories rather than just collecting anecdotes. New technologies opened new possibilities: computers, television broadcasts, case studies, and role playing exercises. Training could now happen outside the classroom in controlled simulations.

Cross-cultural training emerged during this period, too. As companies went global, they discovered that preparing employees for international assignments required more than language classes. Cultural norms, business practices, communication styles—all of this needed explicit instruction. An American executive who succeeded in Chicago might fail spectacularly in Tokyo without proper preparation.

The 1980s brought a data obsession. Organizations started measuring whether training actually worked. Did managers who attended leadership programs become better leaders? Did sales teams who completed product training sell more products? This seems obvious now, but for decades companies had simply assumed training helped without bothering to check.

Then came the 1990s and the concept of lifelong learning. The idea that education ends at graduation began to seem quaint. Technological change meant skills expired faster. Careers spanning multiple industries became normal. Employees started expecting—and demanding—ongoing development opportunities.

Researchers in this decade made a crucial discovery: culture matters more than curriculum. Organizations with training-positive cultures saw better results than those that treated training as a box to check. Employees who believed their companies valued their growth actually grew more.

The 21st century has focused increasingly on teams. Cross-training, where employees learn their coworkers' responsibilities, has become particularly popular. This creates redundancy—if someone calls in sick, others can cover—but more importantly, it builds empathy. People who understand what their colleagues actually do tend to collaborate better with them.

The Cast of Characters

Training and development involve a surprising number of stakeholders, each with their own agenda. Understanding these competing interests explains why training programs often disappoint everyone.

Senior managers sponsor training. They write the checks and expect organizational results: higher productivity, lower turnover, fewer compliance violations. Their time horizon is quarterly earnings and annual reports.

Line managers—the middle layer—have different concerns. They're responsible for coaching employees daily, allocating resources, and evaluating performance. They want training that makes their direct reports easier to manage and their own lives less stressful.

Business planners are the clients who specify what training should accomplish. They're thinking strategically about where the organization needs to go and what capabilities will get it there.

Participants—the people actually being trained—want skills that advance their careers, ideally without too much boring lecture time. Their goals may or may not align with what their employer needs.

Human resources staff facilitate the whole process, coordinating logistics and ensuring compliance with regulations. External providers—consultants, training companies, academic institutions—design and deliver programs, each promoting their own methodologies.

When all these agendas conflict, as they often do, training becomes a negotiation rather than an education. The senior manager wants leadership development that costs nothing. The line manager wants training that doesn't pull people away from their "real" work. The participant wants credentials that help them get hired elsewhere. The HR department wants programs that check regulatory boxes. The external provider wants a contract that leads to more contracts.

Somehow, learning is supposed to happen amid all this.

The Revolution Toward Active Learning

Something significant shifted around 2000. Training became trainee-focused.

This sounds like corporate buzzword-speak, but it represents a genuine philosophical change. Traditional training treated learners as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge. Instructors lectured. Trainees listened. Information flowed one direction.

Active learning flips this model. Learners explore and discover. They make mistakes—deliberately, in controlled environments—and learn from them. Instructors guide rather than dictate.

Error management training deserves special mention here. Traditional approaches try to prevent learners from making mistakes, often by spoon-feeding them step-by-step procedures. Error management training does the opposite: it expects mistakes and treats them as learning opportunities. Research shows this approach produces better long-term retention and more flexible problem-solving skills.

Think about it from a cognitive perspective. When you're told the right answer, you might remember it—or might not. When you try something, fail, figure out why you failed, and try again successfully, you've created multiple neural pathways to the same knowledge. The failure itself becomes a memory anchor.

The ADDIE Model: Training's Swiss Army Knife

If you work in training, you've encountered ADDIE. The acronym stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. It's the instructional systems design approach that has dominated the field for decades.

The first phase, needs assessment, asks fundamental questions. What problem are we solving? Who needs training? What do stakeholders expect? What resources do we have? Too many training programs skip this phase and jump straight to designing content, then wonder why no one cares about their beautifully produced courses.

Program design maps out how training will actually work. What methods will we use? How will we measure success? This is where instructional designers earn their keep, choosing among lectures, simulations, e-learning modules, coaching sessions, and dozens of other approaches.

Development is production work: creating materials, building technology platforms, writing assessments, planning communications. Quality control happens here, ideally before thousands of employees encounter a typo-riddled training manual.

Implementation is delivery day. Trainers train. Learners learn. All the planning meets reality, and reality usually wins at least a few rounds.

Evaluation asks whether any of this worked. Did participants actually learn? Did their behavior change? Did the organization benefit? Most training programs fail at this phase, either skipping evaluation entirely or measuring only whether participants enjoyed the experience—the corporate equivalent of rating a restaurant by how pretty the menu looked.

A Tour of Training Methods

The variety of training approaches available today would astonish practitioners from a century ago.

Apprenticeship remains the oldest and, in many ways, most effective method. A novice works alongside an expert for an extended period, gradually taking on more responsibility. The approach works because learning is contextual—skills develop in the same environment where they'll be used. Germany's entire vocational system builds on this foundation.

Cooperative programs and internships adapt apprenticeship for white-collar work. Students alternate between classroom education and practical experience, often at college or university. The best programs integrate these elements tightly; the worst treat them as separate boxes to check.

Classroom instruction—lectures, demonstrations, videos—remains common despite persistent evidence that passive learning produces passive results. The method persists because it's efficient for instructors and scalable for organizations. Teaching a hundred people at once costs less than teaching them individually.

Self-directed learning puts trainees in control of their own pace and path. Books, manuals, online courses, and interactive software break content into digestible pieces. This approach works well for motivated learners but poorly for those who need external structure to stay focused.

Simulation shines when real-world training would be dangerous, expensive, or impractical. Pilots learn in flight simulators before flying actual aircraft. Surgeons practice on mannequins and cadavers before operating on patients. Factory workers master equipment virtually before touching machines that could injure them.

The key insight across all these methods: different situations call for different approaches. The trainee's prior knowledge matters. The skills being taught matter. The consequences of failure matter. A one-size-fits-all training philosophy fits nobody particularly well.

The Skeptic's Case Against Training

Not everyone believes training works.

The skeptics have points worth considering. Training costs money—not just for programs themselves but for employee time away from productive work. If a week-long course doesn't improve performance, the organization has paid for the course and lost a week of output.

Some skills are better learned through experience than instruction. You can read books about negotiation, but you learn to negotiate by actually negotiating. Classroom knowledge doesn't automatically transfer to real-world behavior.

There's also the "training as theater" problem. Organizations sometimes invest in training to appear progressive rather than to produce results. Diversity training, in particular, has been shown in some studies to have zero or even negative effects on actual workplace diversity—while making executives feel they've done something.

The strongest counterargument: high-reliability organizations. Nuclear power plants, surgical operating rooms, aircraft carriers—these environments cannot tolerate the learning curve that comes from experience. A mistake might kill people or contaminate environments for generations. In these contexts, rigorous training isn't optional. It's the only ethical approach.

Action Learning: The Manager's Solution

In the 1940s, a professor named Reginald Revans proposed something radical. Instead of sending managers to classrooms, why not have them work on actual organizational problems in teams?

He called this action learning and expressed it as a formula: Learning equals Traditional Training Programs plus Questioning to create development insights. The "questioning" part was crucial. Teams would challenge assumptions, reflect on past experiences, and write down new insights to guide future actions.

The approach gained followers slowly at first, then rapidly as chief learning officers—a job title that didn't exist until recently—discovered its power. Action learning produces two outputs simultaneously: solutions to real organizational problems and managers who are better at solving problems.

Compare this to traditional executive education, where managers attend prestigious business schools, study interesting case studies, and return to work wondering how any of it applies to their actual challenges. Action learning never has this transfer problem because the work and the learning are the same thing.

The Public Sector Puzzle

Government agencies face unique training challenges that private companies don't.

Public Service Motivation, or PSM, refers to the prosocial values that draw people to government work. Individuals with high PSM want to help others and contribute to society, not just earn paychecks. This intrinsic motivation is a key predictor of job satisfaction and ethical behavior among public employees.

Here's the problem: competitive civil service hiring may actually select against PSM. When government jobs offer good salaries, job security, and retirement benefits, they attract applicants motivated by those extrinsic rewards. The people who most want to serve the public interest might be crowded out by those who most want the benefits package.

Can training fix this? A study in Taiwan examined a five-week onboarding program for new civil servants. The results were mixed but instructive. Knowledge and attitudes improved significantly—trainees developed stronger perceptions of public service as meaningful work. But Public Service Motivation itself barely budged. Deeply held values, it seems, resist short-term interventions.

The lesson: training can shape how employees perceive their roles and indirectly influence their motivation. It cannot quickly rewire what people fundamentally care about.

The Transfer Problem

Pakistan's public sector provided the setting for research on a challenge that plagues training everywhere: getting employees to actually use what they learned.

Two factors predicted whether trainees implemented their new skills. First, self-efficacy—their confidence in their own ability to apply what they'd learned. Second, training instrumentality—their belief that training would lead to tangible rewards or career advancement.

Both factors depended on organizational climate. A flexible work environment amplified the effect of self-efficacy. If you believed you could apply new skills, a supportive workplace made it easier to actually do so. Performance feedback strengthened the effect of instrumentality beliefs. If you believed training led to rewards, hearing about your performance clarified the connection.

The implications are sobering. Organizations that invest in training but neglect workplace conditions are likely wasting money. Skills taught in classrooms die in hostile environments.

Access Equals Engagement

A study of the United States federal workforce found something that seems obvious but deserves emphasis: employees with access to training opportunities were more engaged than those without.

The gap was substantial—about fifteen percentage points in engagement scores. Training serves as a resource that buffers job demands and enhances motivation. Employees who feel invested in are more likely to invest themselves.

This creates a troubling dynamic. Organizations in financial distress often cut training budgets first, viewing them as discretionary. But this may trigger a downward spiral: less training leads to lower engagement, which leads to lower performance, which leads to worse finances, which leads to more training cuts.

The Mentorship Factor

Women in public organizations who had mentors reported discrimination more readily than those without. This finding from research on gender equity has implications beyond women's issues.

Mentors serve multiple functions. They teach skills and share knowledge, certainly. But they also provide political protection. A woman who reports sexual harassment with a mentor's backing has more organizational credibility than one who reports alone. The mentor's reputation shields the mentee's accusations from automatic dismissal.

Interestingly, opposite-gender mentors were particularly effective at encouraging disclosure. This may seem counterintuitive—wouldn't a female mentee be more comfortable confiding in a female mentor? But a male mentor who takes harassment complaints seriously sends a powerful signal: not all men condone this behavior, and reporting is safe.

Law enforcement presents a particularly difficult case. The aggressive, masculine culture that characterizes many police departments suppresses female officers. Women who speak out risk losing training and promotion opportunities—a cruel irony where seeking development resources can destroy your career development.

What Actually Works

After decades of research, what do we actually know about effective training in public sector contexts?

A review commissioned by the United Kingdom government found that management training programs generally work, but conditions matter. In-person facilitation beats remote delivery. Adaptation to local context beats generic content. Feedback and practice-based components beat passive instruction.

A massive meta-analysis by the Inter-American Development Bank synthesized over four hundred effect estimates. The conclusion: managerial training programs have positive effects on productivity, management practices, and even firm survival. The effects were strongest when programs were tailored to specific sectors and delivered by local organizations rather than outside consultants parachuting in with generic frameworks.

This last point deserves emphasis. The training industry is filled with consultants selling universal solutions. The evidence suggests that universality is precisely the wrong approach. What works in a Brazilian manufacturing plant may fail in a Kenyan government ministry. Local knowledge matters.

Five Principles for Public Sector Training

The research points toward several practical guidelines.

First, strategic training design. Programs must feel relevant and impactful to participants. Training that seems like bureaucratic box-checking produces bureaucratic box-checkers. Training that connects to employees' sense of purpose can indirectly support their motivation for public service.

Second, supportive climate. Even brilliant training fails in hostile environments. Organizations need flexible policies and robust feedback systems to help employees apply what they learn. Without these supports, skills atrophy.

Third, linking training to rewards. Employees need to see clear connections between training completion and career outcomes. If training feels disconnected from advancement, motivation suffers. If promotions go to those who skip training to focus on visible short-term results, everyone gets the message.

Fourth, equitable access. Providing widespread training opportunities improves engagement across the workforce and reduces disparities. When only favored employees get developed, resentment grows and potential goes unrealized.

Fifth, long-term development. Brief interventions can change knowledge and attitudes but rarely transform values. Cultivating intrinsic public service motivation requires sustained effort over years, not a five-week onboarding program.

Tokenism's Ceiling

The concept of tokenism helps explain why training and development opportunities aren't distributed equally, even in organizations with good intentions.

Token status refers to being a visible minority in a group—the only woman on an engineering team, the only person of color in a management cohort. Tokens experience their minority status constantly because everyone around them notices it too.

The status perspective of tokenism suggests that people in low-ranking positions experience the most negative effects. They encounter barriers to rising to senior positions—the proverbial glass ceiling. Training and development opportunities often flow to those already marked for advancement, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where the advantaged become more advantaged.

This explains a puzzle that frustrates many organizations. They invest in diversity initiatives, they create training opportunities, they explicitly try to develop underrepresented employees—and yet the demographics of senior leadership barely change. The problem isn't the training itself but the systems that determine who receives it and whether they can use it.

The Movements That Might Change Everything

Social movements have begun challenging the structures that prevent equitable development.

The United Nations' HeForShe initiative, launched in 2014, invites men to actively support gender equity rather than passively not-objecting to it. The MeToo and Time's Up campaigns have motivated women to share experiences of harassment that previous generations suffered in silence. These movements create awareness that can translate into organizational change.

One practical recommendation emerging from this research: public organizations might designate female mentors from external companies. When internal politics make reporting discrimination risky, outside advocates provide safer channels. If budget constraints prevent this approach, organizations should at minimum expand anti-discrimination training requirements.

But training alone isn't sufficient. The No Fear Act of 2002—legislation motivating employees to report inappropriate behavior—provides legal structure. Yet laws matter only when enforced, and enforcement requires people willing to report problems. The cycle of training, reporting, and enforcement must function together.

What This Means for Terrabank

When a company like Terrabank partners with Miami Dade College to launch AI training for all employees, they're participating in a tradition stretching back millennia. The specific technology is new. The fundamental challenge—preparing people for work that requires new capabilities—is ancient.

The research suggests several questions worth asking about any such initiative. Is the training perceived as relevant by employees, or does it feel like a corporate mandate disconnected from their actual work? Does the organizational climate support applying new AI skills, or will trained employees return to environments that reward doing things the old way? Is access to training equitable, or are certain groups—by function, tenure, or demographics—systematically excluded?

Perhaps most importantly: what happens after the training ends? Brief interventions produce brief results. Sustained development requires sustained commitment. The organizations that will thrive in an AI-transformed economy aren't necessarily those that train first. They're those that train continuously, measure results honestly, and adjust based on what they learn.

In other words, organizations must apply to their own training programs the same principles they want employees to learn: continuous improvement, data-driven decisions, and a willingness to acknowledge when something isn't working.

The history of training and development is littered with fads that promised transformation and delivered disappointment. AI training could easily join that list. Or it could represent something genuinely new—technology powerful enough to reward the organizations that prepare for it and punish those that don't.

The difference will depend less on the technology itself than on whether organizations remember what centuries of experience have taught: training works when it connects to real needs, when it's supported by real systems, and when the people receiving it believe their development actually matters.