The Reluctant Learner

It is?a common story.?One all training and development professionals are familiar with.?

You have a great training programme, one that you have spent months getting developed, organised and ready for delivery. But you go out to the organisation for participants and are met with little more than a lukewarm response. Try as you might you only get a handful of nominations. Even when enough people enrol on the day of training some don’t turn up, filling your inbox with lame excuses and apologies.?

You try harder. You improve your internal marketing, selling the virtues of your programmes and driving interest. You may even get senior ‘buy-in’, advocating the business imperatives for the training and the organisations strong desire for attendance. You may even resort to sanctions against those who don’t or won’t attend.

Reluctant learners are nothing new or unique. Teachers, educationists, parents and of course training professionals are all familiar with this and there exists a plethora of ideas to counter it. However, reluctant learners still exist, and it doesn’t matter how much effort we put into having the best class or programme, it changes little.

Even those organisations who have adopted the ‘learning organisation’ paradigm are not excluded from this issue, wasting resources, time and effort on attempts to ‘encourage’ programme attendance. Even when they get people on seats, the participants remain reluctant, counting the time down until they can leave.?

Is there a solution? Well, of course, there is nothing easy, no quick fix. Unfortunately, all that seems to happen is the reluctant learner gets more reluctant, feeling increasingly isolated or challenged about their behaviour and or just ignored.

We have faced this exact same problem, tried many if not all the solutions and ideas to encourage and stimulate participation in our programmes and those we procured when we were responsible for people development within organisations.?However, we learnt that we have to do something else. That we need to investigate and uncover the real learning culture in an organisation, revealing how it may be contributing to the reluctance or reticence when it comes to attending programmes, workshops or classes.

Once doing this we can start to tackle some of the root causes for the issues and help individuals be at least a little less reluctant when it comes to learning.