Do your training… or you’re fired!

Yeap that’s right, global consulting giant Ernst & Young Global Consulting Services has fired dozens of employees for doing multiple trainings at once. Ever had a couple trainings on at the same time so you could get through them quickly? Well, do that at EY and it’s time to pack your stuff. So everyone’s asking, are they overreacting? We’re more interested in why EY employees had two trainings on at the same time in the first place. How boring are these trainings? And how can their level of involvement be so extremely low that you can literally do two of them at once?

I don’t know about you but I’m not a two-things-at-once guy; maybe eating popcorn and watching a movie at the same time is in the realm of possibility, but definitely not two trainings that are going to advance my career. So, what’s happening here? Well, there are two schools of thought on this issue: one is that the employees are at fault and being unethical for not participating fully in trainings, and the second is that EY is at fault and should have warnings or better systems in place that prevent you from doing more than one training at a time. Here’s our controversial opinion -?

The trainings are at fault!?

According to the Training magazine 's Industry Report, the biggest problem companies have with trainings is getting employees to engage with them. And I can understand their frustration, a big company like EY will pay up to $1,500 dollars per employee per year. A little bit of math and you can see why senior management gets peeved that people are cheating their way through trainings. But why? Surely, if you’re at a Big Four accounting firm, you’d be thrilled to do trainings and be deeply engaged with them. Well, have you seen what these trainings are like?

8 times out of 10 the trainings will be a senior talking at you on a Zoom call for an hour. 2 times out of 10 the trainings will be hosted on an LMS where you’ll read a word document and then be expected to answer questions about it, which you’ll get wrong, so you’ll just retake the quiz until you get them right. And 0 times out of 10 will you get a course that engages you. Let’s make it clear, the subject matter is not the problem; if there was a Big 4 of lion taming firms, their trainings would be dull. It’s all to do with how the content is presented to the employee, and how they are able to interact with it.?

At Stratia , we take a novel approach to training. We use creativity to lead the way we create training. Our number one goal: make training that people WANT to do. So we use Articulate to build engaging, gamified training so employees have fun doing their training (yes, we think fun is allowed in the workplace). We use lovely designs, songs, and puzzles, and the end result is employees who actually remember what they learned in the training.

So, would those EY employees have kept their jobs if Stratia made the trainings? Yes!

Get in touch to learn how!