The training side - how do we learn now?

These past months have taught us that you can’t simply take the training session you used to deliver in a large room and run it as a video conference. Delegates struggle to concentrate as it is, and video conferencing makes it harder again. We need to make training sessions more focused, interactive and especially shorter. Unfortunately, it takes longer and requires greater effort to create a short session.

Inducting new people continues to be a massive challenge with remote working continuing as the norm for some time.  Induction training often allowed new starters to ask random questions whilst learning how things really work… but lengthy, video based induction is going to be exhausting and less effective. Organisations which haven’t overhauled their induction training really need to do so.

What will home working do for the traditional apprenticeship module in law firms? How are trainees going to get to know, and then learn from, colleagues?  How can we best supervise the work of juniors?  The answer is that firms need to be much more deliberate and structured – it is no longer enough to rely on osmosis. It is likely that the learning process will take longer or be incomplete if firms don’t take positive steps to re-engineer it. For decades, the legal profession has been discussing how to ensure juniors learn when clients won’t pay for on the job training – the debate is starker now. There is now a stronger argument for clearly defining processes, including for detailed legal work. In our view, this reinforces the need for good knowledge management, providing standard documents, playbooks and the like.