With the plethora of soft-skills courses such as time management and leadership skills now being offered on the Web, it could very well be signalling a death knell for classroom training for all but the most technical courses.
One of the major benefits of completing a course online is that you can fit it around your work schedule, and when you have a spare hour you can log on and do a bit more of your training. However, the drawback is that you may constantly be disturbed by colleagues. So it makes sense that one of the benefits of classroom-based training is that it requires you to be out of the office, leaving you to focus 100 percent on the course (that's the theory anyway, however mobile phones, PDAs, and Blackberries do have a way of intruding at any time).
Classroom-based training also benefits from the personal touch -- but how important is that personal touch? And are online courses really effective? We decided to put the two methods of training to the test.
The courses
We sent a journalist to complete NETg's K43021 and Dimension Data Learning Solutions' (DDLS) classroom-based Time Management course. NETg recommends its course will take between two and four hours to complete, and the DDLS course goes for one day, 9am to 5pm, and is run by Guy Newman.
From the outset, the content of the two courses is fairly similar -- both discuss the principles of time management, the importance of making lists, the different personality characteristics, the approach to making goals, and how to create a time management strategy. However the two courses are very different in terms of approach, and result in two very different outcomes.
The online way
NETg's online course is very theoretical and structured in its teachings and it judges your performance through a series of tests. The course is split into three major sections -- Understanding Your Time, Identifying Goals and Setting Priorities, and Developing a Time Management Plan. Each section contains around six different learning's and through each of the six steps you are presented with a series of tests.
For example, in Understanding Your Time you are taught the difference between the five time management characteristics (such as the procrastinator, the perfectionist, the easily distracted, and so on). After that section you are asked to pick out those five characteristics out of a list of around eight personality types, and you are corrected on the spot.
I would recommend TIME CONTROL online training (www.timecontrol.cc). This course is a series of time management skills modules ,which is more Behaviour based learning. Unlike most cl****es which are focued on scheduling techniques, Time Control delves into our attitude, energy management and behaviour patterns to become better time managers.The cl****es include Text, multimedia and live workshop exercises to help modify behaviour patterns gradually for the best results