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Training courses are useless if you don’t engage your team afterwards

You need to practice what you learn

Product leaders will want to change how their product managers are doing their work.

The way that they do that is they send all the product managers on their team to a training, and then the product managers come back and nothing changes. 

The managers wonder, “what went wrong?” Maybe the training wasn’t very good.

It’s almost never the case that the training is the problem.

It works best if the manager and the team are not thinking about the training in isolation, but within the broader context of their company. 

It’s very rarely the problem that the product manager doesn’t know what to do. Product managers have read the books, they listen to the podcasts, and they’ve heard all of these amazing things to do. 

The answer is that the training needs to be joined within the infrastructure, within the system of their company in order to actually make that change be material within their company. 

Professional development can’t just be, “let’s send you to training.” It has to be training plus other things around it in order for it to be successful. 

Check out the full interview with Jason: 

There are three questions to ask to determine if a training will be successful: 

1. Is there a knowledge gap that this course will fill?

2. Are they getting evaluated and incentivized to change the way they work such that it aligns with the training?

3. Does the company have the infrastructure in place to support the desired behavior? 

The manager sending their team to training should be making sure that after the training happens, there are incentives and systems to help apply the learnings from the training within the company. 

What do you think? Are most trainings useless without the right follow-up, or am I being overly dramatic?