The information in this article is entirely anecdotal.
I recently delivered two unrelated training courses in the United Arab Emirates.
One was a public course. There were 12 delegates from 4 companies (and maybe more importantly, 4 countries).
The other was an in-house course. There were 13 delegates, and because it was an in-house course, they were all from the same company.
Both were very challenging and rewarding experiences for me as the “trainer” – and I put trainer in quotes because I also learned a great deal.
But the differences between these two courses (from my perspective of evaluating the performance of the delegates, not from the perspective of course content) was quite significant, and I cannot help but wonder if the in-house environment was less conducive to learning than the public session environment.
In the public session, the delegates were very willing to share their experience, analyse the problems of other delegates, offer encouragement, swap stories, swap jokes, and generally actively interacted with each other. Eventually, all became comfortable with everyone else in the group. The delegates were not disrespectful, but were very willing to engage in lively discussion.
In the in-house session, the delegates had worked together (in some cases, they had worked together for years). The companionship was good but different – with the discussions tending to focus on general work issues rather than training issues.
Feedback from the delegates in both sessions was positive and that the delegates benefitted from the training. But from my perspective, the public session was livelier and more interactive, and I am 100% certain more was learned in the public session than the in-house session.
I then reviewed my notes on all of the training sessions I have run in my career. In reviewing my notes, I believe my observations from the United Arab Emirates was not unique – I believe almost every public course has been a better course than every in-house course I have ever run – just purely because of the cross mix of delegates.
From this, I can anecdotally conclude that training sessions work better when the delegates are from a mix of organisations.
With an in-house session, the delegates are probably familiar with each other, and are less likely to interact in a way to learn something new from each other.
With a public session, the delegates are meeting for the first time. There are more opportunities to learn – not just from the trainer, but from the other delegates.
In addition, in-house delegates tend to be more intimidated and less likely to constructively interact.
Training is not about the trainer delivering the material, it is about the delegates learning. The trainer will not have a 100% success rate. But … if one delegate learns from the trainer, that delegate can then interact with the other delegates, increasing the knowledge of all. I have learned that we learn more through dialogue than monologue, and monologue is what happens with the delegates do not interact.
If a delegate can teach another delegate something (because my message was not effective) then both learn. The teaching delegate learns because he must formulate and understand all information in his mind before explaining it. It is win-win.
Now, there are benefits of in-house training over public training.
Lower cost
No travel cost
No venue cost, as an under-utilised meeting room can be used instead of leasing a venue (usually from a hotel)
In an “emergency”, management can pull the delegates out of the training to attend to the “crisis”
Material can be customised to be company specific, with real company situations
All of these tend to lower the per delegate cost of training – it is very measureable and tangible.
For this reason (lower cost) I expect in-house training will remain popular and potentially more popular than public training. That is … until we can develop some new measurements of the relative success of public training.