Have you ever gone to a 3-day intensive training and feel like you didn’t absorb all the information? Somehow you missed out and now your boss expects you to be an expert in the topic. If we establish an analogy of learning to food, you could compare these types of trainings to 3 days of multi-course meals, one after another. Your body can’t digest all of that material. So much goes to waste. The same with training.
Digestible training would be training in chunks of size that your brain has an appetite for and capacity to assimilate. Perhaps not all training can be done in this fashion, but the tools available to us today to provide skills training at a distance are incredibly easy to use. I think trainings can be broken down into small, 15-minute or less digestible chunks. If a topic at hand truly takes 8 hours, then break it down into something more easily processed and retained. If its self-paced distance learning, it gives people the opportunity to work at their pace to properly absorb the skills and information. People that learn fast can take on more chunks at once than someone who might be new to a subject or got stuck on one point and needs to research a little more to grasp a concept.
It is my goal to issue a series of digestible training videos to my clients and different ones the public at large. There are a lot of good examples of this type of training already out there, but I still see a lot of these intensive 3-day training camps that, in my mind, are more of a waste of money and time than a benefit (if there were other ways to teach the topic – some skills to not lend themselves to distance learning). Here’s a good example of how to make an MP3 podcast in digestible chunks.
