Teaching others

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
Aristotle
384 – 322 BC

I recently had an experience where a client was losing a key employee. It was a rather small business and the job was not high tech. The employee had given a full two months notice, so a replacement was hired and spent a little over a month in training. The old employee had not been gone for more than a week when I got a frantic call to come and help out.

While I didn’t participate in the hiring or the training, I’m fairly certain what happened. The old employee showed the new person all the things she was doing. She made the classic mistake of showing and telling.

It’s almost impossible to learn simply by watching. Being shown how to do something is a far cry from doing it; you will never truly understand something unless you do it yourself. You can’t learn to drive a car by watching someone else do it, nor can you learn by reading a book about it. To truly become proficient, you need to get behind the wheel yourself.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated example. I see it far too often, which brings up a fundamental problem. Often, people fail to distinguish between knowledge and skill. To be successful, you need a certain level of knowledge, but you also must possess the necessary skills. You can only develop the required skills by actually doing the activity.

The most successful method for learning – and I mean really learning – is to do the job. By actually doing the tasks, the person being trained will ask questions, make mistakes and eventually get stuck. Then you have a real learning opportunity.

If it’s your job to train or teach people, realize that the lecture or demo method must be used in conjunction with hands-on experience. If you try to teach someone without providing hands-on opportunities, you are cheating them; you will be setting them up for failure.

Let the trainee make mistakes when their errors are not too costly. They will gain confidence in themselves by actually doing the work. And by fully understanding the process, they are able to suggest improvements. One of the goals of any organization should be constant improvement. How can an employee help if they don’t understand enough to make positive changes?

You can teach someone the basic knowledge necessary to do a job. But they must develop the skills necessary to become proficient. Those skills can only be developed by actually doing the work.

Don’t confuse knowledge and information with skills. You can teach knowledge; each person must develop their own skills.

Knowledge must come through action; you can have no test which is not fanciful, save by trial.
Sophocles
c. 495 – 406 BC