The Difference of Adult Learners in Corporate Training

I recently read a study by Penny Newman, and Ed Peile called Valuing learners' experience and supporting further growth: educational models to help experienced adult
learners in medicine. They broke down the difference between childhood and adult education into 6 principles

· Adults need to know why they need to learn something
· Adults maintain the concept of responsibility for their own decisions,their own lives
· Adults enter the educational activity with a greater volume and more varied experiences than children
· Adults have a readiness to learn those things that they need to know in order to cope effectively with real life situations
· Adults are life centered in their orientation to learning
· Adults are more responsive to internal motivators than external motivators

They contrast this with childhood education which they describe as:

· Designed for teaching children
· Assigns to the teacher full responsibility for all decision making about the
learning content, method, timing, and evaluation
· Learners play a submissive part in the educational dynamics

I think this needs to be on the wall of every Training Manager in corporate training. Many of us, me included, come from the academic world of education , but the transition to adult corporate based training is beyond training it is truly an overall life changing experience. When I trained Clients of Company X Inc to increase the exposure of their websites, I changed more than their websites. Clients’ lives changed with greater success and sales. They also took on the responsibility of learning. As an academic teacher I was totally responsible for my students’ results. In corporate training we share the responsibility of learning and growing together. The clients had the motivation of knowing why they were learning the content which made it life centered. Corporate Training Managers have a chance to change lives while increasing the bottom line of the corporation they have represented.

This article is located at
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=117453&blobtype=pdf