The Speed of People
Training is usually an event, something like a half-day seminar or a two-hour class. Some training can be a series of events strung together over a defined timeframe, like spring training for Major League Baseball. In an educational sense, training is about information acquisition and possibly with experiential components mixed in. These kinds of opportunities can be entertaining, practical, thought provoking, and effective for networking as a side benefit. In a practice sense, training can be about repetition and coaching for skill development or rehearsals for entertainment productions. These are short-term focused activity-based experiences with targeted duration and anticipated outputs or benefits.
Development, on the other hand, is a different animal. Less an event and more a journey, development experiences are a form of travel over a longer period. Development experiences are about patience for long term investment instead of quick returns. Unlike training events that have crisp start and stop times with explicit outcomes, development experiences have more variables and participants have less certainty of course and outcomes. This is harder to package, and it creates a fuzzier return on investment for participants paying for a development program and organizations paying into it as an investment.
As an example, a company sends a software engineer to a three-day training on a tool to help them gain specific skills to use on a project. That software engineer will come back from that training with a solid head start and be somewhat established in their proficiency and ability to use that new tool. If that same software engineer is on a path to be a software architect they will be on a developmental journey for years. Those years will hold a combination of experiences that twill take them through multiple projects, exposure to many tools, hundreds of technical challenges and problems to solve, exercising communication and collaboration skills they never dreamed would be required. They will find themselves standing in a very different perspective on people, work, technologies, and processes than from where they started. That is what developmental experiences do.
You might go to Disney World to “experience” the latest new park adventure and that is an event where you, the person, experience “it”, that specific experience. A developmental journey is a different experience in that it is inherently a varied assortment of experiences in aggregate that slowly shape you and grow you in certain ways. A Disney World event is something you consume, where years of exposure, learning, success, failure, and finding your way making sense of things one experience at a time is something, a group of “somethings” you carry with you.
Many companies have invested in “Training and Development” departments with teams supporting advancing talent development. A challenge often faced is a lack of impact where more dramatic impact is expected. Sometimes this is because there is a misunderstanding about the distinction between those two terms. When “development” means you have run a sequence of trainings in the short term, the expectation is that people should be growing, advancing, becoming better in their skills and capabilities in an immediate cause and effect manner. There is frequently disappointment and disillusionment about investment when longer term expectations are unsatisfied by short term mental maps or programming around growth that are aligned to training, but not true development.
Whether or not organizations have the patience, incentives, or business models to passionately support true people development over time is an open question. People development takes an intentional architected frame facilitating internalized growth over time. It can be challenging for fast moving companies, in fast moving markets, encapsulated in fast moving technologies, to create a space for actual developmental mindsets and approaches that operate on a longer runway at the speed of people, not the speed of a software upgrade.