Mr Cholmondeley-Warner wrote:waremark wrote:I believe that the IAM has several times set out to show an accident reduction from their training and has never succeeded.
This, and other research, is what Horse was probably referring to (I expect it was his post that prompted the indignant responses that "of course" training works). Having read some of his posts, and the technical papers he's contributed to, I'm inclined to take him a little more seriously than some, and react with caution rather than just gut feeling
It is hardly gut feeling, we have a country with centuries of tradition of training and education demonstrating that training / education clearly works in progressing people along a path...
one example of one oragnisation with a skewed population taking the training (a desire to do the training could mean less likelihood of accident anyway, so no difference with the training) does nothing to disprove the notino that training works - yes, it has to be good training effective / targetted / etc. - but as someone who is a trained teacher, and has decades of experience in education as a teacher / governor / etc. I can absolutely confirm that training works...
how anyone can believe that training doesn't work is beyond me - I have several tennis lessons a week and my tennis clearly progressing (well it couldn't really have gone backwards!), on Saturday I had a training session on off-road rally driving - I learned from it and moved forwards, over the last decade or so I have consciously taken training in something new every year - from learning to water-ski to progressing my skiing, yacht masters to advanced powerboats - and of course driver training... it is absolutely clear that training works...
when people say that training doesn't work, what they really mean is:
- the training was poor
- the trainer wasn't up to standard
- objectives and training were not matched
- the training wasn't focused correctly
- the participants weren't motivated / interested / were tired / etc.
- etc.
none of that means that training doesn't work
just that the particular instance wasn't good...
with the IAM and accident reduction - the IAM course is not focused on reducing national accident statistics - if it were, it would probably target a different market, and have different content, so hardly surprising then that you get such a result - it is an inappropriate expectation...
Alasdair