Admittedly, Bob Pike is a “collector” of things, having thrown very little away in his lifetime. In reference to that, Bob found the original data he used for a 1976 article surveying trainers on various aspects of the industry for the opening session of the 14^th Annual Training and Performance Solutions Conference in Bloomington, Minn. In a session entitled “The World is Changing—or is it?” Bob compared the data from then to data he received in an informal survey of 500 colleagues that ended September 25.

In 1976, an in-house trainer was used 60 percent of the time to deliver information while outside seminars and outside consultants were used 25 and 15 percent of the time respectively. Today, those numbers are: in-house trainers 30 percent of the time, outside seminars unchanged, and the use of outside consultants 45 percent.

Delivery methods used most frequently these days, according to the informal survey, are classroom training (60 percent), asynchronous elearning (20 percent), webinars (10 percent), one-on-one coaching (5 percent--a category that didn’t exist in the 1976 training survey), and teleseminars (5 percent).

At the opening reception Tuesday night, Bob had asked the participants attending to line up according to experience. Nearly half the attendees have been in training less than 10 years; and, according to the American Society for Training and Development, about half stay in training five years or less before moving on. In today’s session, Bob highlighted the importance of gleaning information from those departing trainers on how they dealt with training challenges because, in 31 years, the three main challenges remain the same: getting manager buy-in, transfer training, and getting people to show up after they’ve signed up.

Bob also highlighted the importance of having “pain conversations” at the beginning of training design to help position training as an investment and to better quantify the return on investment (ROI).

The conference runs through Friday morning, September 28.