Is corporate training always done on employees' free time?

Is education and training always done in an employee's free time? The answer is most often "yes" for salaried employees.

The at-best freeing up of work time to take a class is irrelevant, as the actual work needed to be done by the employee is not reduced, but instead often shifted to employees' free time, such as early-morning late-night, weekends, or lunch. It is one thing for a manager to approve training, it is quite another for manager to free up work.

If this is not the case, the situation is perhaps even more unfair. The work may be pushed to an employee's teammates.

In setting it up this way, managers have set up employees to resent training, and then hold it again the training organizations when they do.

But what is the alternative? Studying this in practice suggests a tangential observation: The degree to which the number of training hours is consistent across all employees may correlate with the organizations' support for formal learning processes better than many other metrics. This eveness creates empathy and fairness. It makes education seem appropriately as part of work and not something else done outside of work.

Does this mean that, for example, every employee in an organization should be required to take a certain amount of training or education each year? Plenty of great organizations have a two-week per year expectation.

But this in itself has plenty of risks. Setting a level can be a burden to some employees, actually costing them more free time. And creating artificial internal market for education may create a date mini-market for "gut" courses -- easy and convenient.

So looking as the distribution of employees across amount of training consumed in a given year may be a valuable dashboard, with a more equal number correlating with the more successful learning culture, but forcing it directly may have the opposite effect

The other option may be group training events. Perhaps when an entire group can train together, then there is the biggest payoff.

In a Sim, do you let players limp along?

Here is an interesting question in simulation design. Do you let players limp along through your simulation never failing, but never really succeeding either?

This approach certainly has some fidelity to it. There are plenty of people in real life, and some would argue most people in real life, that just simply limp along. Imagine a simulation on stewardship, where treating your land poorly early on leads to a long-term addictiveness to chemical fertilizers, that continues to cost more money while producing less healthy crops. For turn after turn, the player stays in business, but just barely. Pretty soon, the player cannot stop using chemicals or he or she goes out of business, but also can't be successful when so much of the farm profits go to a chemical company. While realistic, this experience is neither satisfying for the player nor is it especially educational when all is said and done.

You don't want a situation where people who are having trouble with the sim have an increasingly miserable experience as they progress. You don't want to let people dig too deep of a hole. The mediocrity of the play may encourage players to try again. But the challenge could easily be, as is often the case with sims, that people want to change but don't know how.

It may be better to have performance gates over which players have to get in order to continue. These all or nothing moments may end up being contrived, but they may also force players into states of more extreme frustration that leads to new behaviors. This is from where the "aha" moments come. And then on the other side of performance gate, players get a sense of "starting over." They get new land and a new opportunity. While this is hardly realistic, isn't that the point of simulations?

To some degree, having a sim in a classroom environment can force a student to a) reflect on their lack of success and come up with reasons for it, and b) start over. But the more sims are in a self-motivated environment (and training in corporations today more resemble a self-motivated environment than a classroom), the more they have to resolve false assumptions quickly.