Regardless of the industry in which you work, if you want to be successful (or even just survive), you need to be continually learning. Banks, like other companies, spend lots of money every year teaching and training their employees. Every organization wants to stay on the cutting edge, and with the business environment changing so rapidly, no one wants to be left behind.

Yet when many of us hear the word “learning” we flash back to a negative experience in a school classroom as a child. The last thing we want is to be subjected to that process again. So if learning is so important, how can you be sure your bank isn’t wasting its precious “learning and development” dollars?
I do have a B.A. in Psychology, but almost everything I learned in the college classroom about human behavior was either irrelevant or just plain bogus. But I now spend most of my waking hours every day in the greatest learning laboratory in the United States – my home. That’s right, my wife and I and nine of our children all live under one roof… and we home school them year-round. Given that their ages range from newborn to 13, there is a lot of learning happening around here (and I don’t just mean the children). Combine this invaluable daily experience with my 19 years of training and managing Credit Analysts, and I can at least offer an educated opinion about how to best help others learn.

Crazy as this might sound coming from a guy who writes and sells training materials, I don’t think the most important factor in training is the content. You can have the absolute best material on the planet, but if the learner isn’t prepared to learn and put into the right environment, there’s a good chance that not much learning is going to take place. I’m fully aware of the significant differences between my 6-year-old son and a 23-year-old banker, but they do share this in common: if they are distracted, anxious, or afraid, they aren’t going to absorb much of anything, no matter what you put in front of them.

There should be nothing more natural than to want to satisfy a curiosity about a topic in which we have interest. Whether you have toddlers in your home or not, you know that they love to explore their surroundings because everything is new to them.

There is so much they don’t know, so why should they not touch, taste, and see everything they can?! (This is why we don’t buy expensive furniture or fragile home décor – they only invite destruction.)

I majored in Math my first two years of college so working with numbers comes pretty easily to me. Yet none of my children were ready for Algebra when they were six. As with most subjects, there is necessarily a progression when learning math, and while some move thorough it more quickly and easily than others, they all still need to start at the beginning.

There is a reason why we always teach our children to add before we require them to memorize their multiplication tables. Remember, I’m the Dad who looks for ways to incorporate geometry into conversations at the dinner table. So I’m eager for them to move on to bigger and better things, but with math, as with banking, building a firm foundation for learning is key.

You’re eager for your new trainee to be able to add a sensitivity analysis to your cash flow template, but if they don’t first truly understand what EBITDA is and why it matters, then you’re wasting your time and money with advanced cash flow training. In fact, you may actually hinder your trainee’s learning and end up frustrating and discouraging them. Patient preparation is the antidote to this poison.

The second piece to the learning puzzle is creating the right environment. (No, I’m not suggesting ergonomic desks.) To borrow another example from my home learning lab, my children tend to struggle with absorbing even the simplest information when they’re troubled about something. New vocabulary isn’t going to stick if we teach it immediately after they’ve fallen off of their bike or been corrected for bad behavior.

Similarly, you may not have much success dumping truckloads of information on your new Analyst when they’re still in the early exploration stage of their job. Let them relax and enjoy the process a step at a time. Like a new puppy in your home, they need time to sniff out their new digs and feel safe in doing so, even if they make a few mistakes. Introduce them to the people, language, and culture of their new corporate home.

This might sound like it will take more time than you have, especially given the manic pace at which companies now expect their new employees to move. But if you think that creating a good atmosphere and providing some preparatory learning is expensive, wait until you get the bill for employee attrition and hiring a replacement! Indeed, you’ll find that when it comes to learning, the shortcut to success is often taking the long way.