Building a skill through baby steps

I once read a beautiful story that illustrates how a skill can be built by gradually and effortlessly, by incremental steps.

A cow gave birth to a calf in a farm. The farmer’s son was a teenage boy. He developed a fondness for the newborn calf, and would play with it everyday in the evening after school, carrying the calf around in his arms. As the days passed, the calf grew in size and weight. The farmer’s son continued his habit of carrying around the calf. As the years passed, the calf grew into a full-grown bull and the teenager grew into a strapping young man. Thanks to his daily habit of lifting the calf, the young man was able to lift a full-grown bull without even realizing the increase in his strength.

Now, don’t get fixated on the details – whether it is really possible for a man to lift a full-grown bull, etc..the point is that a skill can be built effortlessly through incremental steps.

• Learn one new word everyday and in ten years your vocabulary will have grown by over 3650 words. The average person’s total lifetime vocabulary is only about 5000-6000 words.
• If you are jogger/runner/walker, try adding just 0.1 km more every week. In one year, you will be able to cover 5 km more than what you can now.

Building a skill through small, incremental steps is a great way to develop yourself effortlessly. You will be amazed at yourself.

In this context, I am reminded of a quote I firmly believe in – Most people overestimate what they can do in a day, and underestimate what they can do in a year.

Intangible benefits of training

In addition to imparting specific skills (technical or soft skills) to employees, corporate training has the following intangible benefits :

• Variety : Provides a refreshing break from the monotony of everyday work and gives the brain something new to feed on.

• Stress relief: For those involved in stressful jobs – for example frontline customer support – training provides a getaway (even if only for a few hours or a couple of days at the most). I am not saying training is a vacation, but it will most likely be less stressful than jobs like customer support.


• Networking: A training session can be a platform that brings together people from various teams within the same company. It can provide an opportunity for people to get to know each other better and exchange ideas.

• Team-building: Some teams are highly dispersed – for example a team of sales people who are always out of office meeting customers. For such teams, training sessions could be the only occasions when everyone comes together in one place.


• Employee reward: Providing training to employees is one of the best ways for management to communicate the message that they care about the employees’ growth. Thus, training is a performance reward. Also, if the training is at an overseas location, it is an added perk (if the employee likes to travel!)

Will instructor-led corporate training become extinct?

Until a generation ago, instructor-led training was the only form of training. Now, it is one of the many forms of training available. The other forms include a variety of methods –most of which can be encompassed by the term e-learning. With the world becoming more and more technology driven, will there be a point when instructor-led training becomes extinct ?

I firmly believe the answer is NO.

My reasoning for this conclusion:

• Some skills simply cannot be mastered by self-study or by e-learning. For example, a course of effective presentation skills would be effective only in a live, instructor led session. Trying to learn good presentation skills by watching multimedia would be no more effective than trying to learn swimming that way.

• Practically everyone has started his/her education in an instructor-led environment at school. Consequently, at a subliminal level, our mind associates learning or training with a teacher (a person as opposed to a set of CD’s or webpages). This is a very powerful association in our mind, and cannot be brushed away simply because instructor-led training could be more expensive or time-consuming. Ignoring this very real need for a live instructor will lead to ineffective training that wastes real dollars.

This white paper (web link below) has some excellent thoughts on why adopting e-learning may not be as easy as it sounds.

http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/adopting_elearning.pdf