trainers discover training

‘Yes, but what can you do now you've been on that six week course?’ How many employers have asked that question of their newly appointed trainer on his return from a somewhat expensive introductory course for training officers? Qualified for grant reclamation purposes he may be, but a common experience for many a course member is to go back to his organisation unable to put into practice much of the theory he has been taught. It was as an attempt to overcome this problem, hardly unique to training officers, that we redesigned our introductory course. Working on the principle that knowledge can be taught while skills can only be learned, and on the theory that the training officer needs to apply rather more skill than knowledge in his job, we designed a course using the so‐called discovery or learning‐by‐doing approach. The experiment has met with some success. The results have been exciting and the lessons we have learned could have wide application, not only to the training of trainers, but to management in general. This article sets out to describe our work during the past year and to highlight some of our more important discoveries.