Business schools embrace lifetime learning. Yet, not by their clientele, it appears. Statistics show that around the age of 55, the number of professionals participating in formal corporate training diminishes quickly. Is it possible that these wise, aged minds are being overlooked?
It’s easy to assume that senior executives are being discriminated against because companies are focusing their efforts on younger employees. This, however, is not the case. Employees, not organizations, are the source of reluctance. It appears that traditional training no longer meets their requirements. Formal programs are frequently perceived as a recitation of previously taught teachings, and they are becoming increasingly useless in the light of experience and competence. Most rewards are ineffective against the consequent “training tiredness.”
This isn’t to say that more senior executives have fully abandoned the concept of personal and professional development. Instead of enrolling in business school, this group chooses to take a do-it-yourself strategy, performing their own research and trading battle experiences with their friends.
Self-learning Managers
There are two potential drawbacks to self-learning. The first is that a great deal of information and expertise is lost in the classroom, lowering the training’s value for everyone else. Non-participation, on the other hand, may signal the start of a process of disconnection from the organization, its goals, and objectives, which would eventually harm both parties. Furthermore, as executives’ careers extend into their seventies, education becomes even more important.
Throwing money at the problem is one solution. Senior executives appear to be rapidly won over when given the opportunity to mix with their peers at a top business schools rather than a bog-standard college. During these Covid-stricken times, Online learning has not diminished its appeal. On the contrary, it has boosted senior executives’ participation. The number of elderly managers enrolled in their programmes has not decreased, and that organizations have continued to spend extensively in them despite the slump.
A few companies could afford to enroll all of their senior executives through the costly premier programs offered by top business schools. Firms do, however, need to involve those managers below the C-suite—what one management expert refers to as the “magnificent middle”—because these are the front-liners who make things happen in any corporation and carry the secrets of how the organization works around in their minds.
Making training less about abstract theory and more on the actual workplace is one method to do this. This means avoiding the case studies that business schools love and instead connecting new concepts to what is happening on a day-to-day basis within the organization. To do this, executives should receive training in short, rapid spurts, allowing them to take a lesson, put it into practice, assess its efficacy, and then return to modify it further in light of this “test of courage.”
This method is taken a step further. Getting Senior managers to train themselves is the greatest approach to win them over. Learning guidelines are provided to managers but not to teachers. The emphasis is unapologetically simple. Laptops, smartphones and other electronic devices should be banned from classes or online courses in favor of pen and paper. There’s no more effective learning than talking about and reflect on how the topic affects trainees. The managers] learn from one another and, most importantly, devise activities for their respective workplaces.
Whatever strategy an organization decides to welcome its senior managers, an aging population forces it to act, or face the much more serious challenge of replacing them and their important knowledge in the not-too-distant future. Unfortunately, instilling the value of lifelong learning to an elderly folks is no mean feat.