You are kidding yourself if you believe that a classroom training will turn you into a better self, more competent, more performant. Nowadays many employees do not believe in their abilities either because they don’t trust themselves or because they received developmental feedback and don’t know how to improve. And the simplest way to cope with it is to believe that you need to learn – that much is true. But it is false to think that participating to a training session will solve all your problems.
It is needed more than participating to a training session – even an active participation – to learn. I personally have met only 2-3 persons that succeeded practice by themselves what they’ve learned in training. Change takes effort. Constant effort.
Self-determination is an important but not sufficient condition to learn. Even before attending to a course you need to mentally open to it, and then, to take what is relevant for you from it. After training you need to think about: what have I learned, what and how can I practice it.
Another equally important condition is to propose. Yes, to aim to apply some of the notions learned. And that’s the difficult part. You really have to consciously apply the same thing over and over again. Dr. Maltz’s theory in the 1950s said that you needed to repeat 21 times a day to learn something. Recent studies by Phillippa Lally at University College London have shown that we actually need 2 to 8 months of daily practice to turn a conscious activity into a habit!
So, if you want to develop a skill by participating in a course, it is not impossible, but the course is just the foundation. Course support is the reference and consciously practicing after the course, reflection and learning from mistakes while practicing are actually the key to success.