According to an article I read the other day, most people want “Instructor Led Training” (ILT) at work.

I was shocked; this was contrary to what I hear from people at work and in organisations. so I thought I’d dig a little.

Firstly, it was a vendor saying it. Not as an advert or marketing piece but as an insight blog. As I’ve said before. your first thought when you read something online is its provenance – who is telling you the information and what might their purpose be?

Next was a comment that “60% of people prefer in-person learning”. I mentioned my shock so I thought I’d do a bit of digging. The source was easy enough to find but it was a single source which looked at the preferences of 336 Greek university students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Surprisingly, there was a general preference for in-person learning, attributed to better engagement, understanding, and social interaction.

The article also suggested that 54% of learning was still delivered face to face. This was from a Forbes article – again written by someone with an interest in ILT. The stat, when tracked back, came from a report published in 2018. Can you guess where the report was from? A professional body made up of people with ILT as part of their core offer. As well as being before the pandemic, it was before the shift to more hybrid work, 5G network rollouts, fibre and increased home speed Wi-Fi, smart home hubs, streaming and on demand video services, LLM and generative AI tools, automated translation tools, image generation, video avatars, etc. The relevance of a survey from 2018 needs to be questioned now.

I stopped digging at that point; my concern is that people will read an article like that and assume it’s still as relevant and valid as it ever was. A quick check through the 6 levels of data veracity mentioned recently- undeniable, credible, plausible, speculative, dubious, and bogus -and we’re in the speculative and plausible territory at best.

We must be better in L&D. Vendors need to understand the market better. Professionals need to keep at the edge of the curve and look up and out. I’m not digging out the profession here – I have a vested interest in people doing things better and want people to succeed not win – winners assumes losers, whereas success is shareable with everyone.

If you want help being better, please let me know and we can chat about how I might be able to support you. Can you afford not to?