With the risk of sounding old: When I was young, if you wanted to learn something, you basically had two options: Read a book and start self-teaching, or book a training session and learn through that.

Since then, a lot has changed. And that’s a good thing. Video tutorials, podcasts, blogs, magazines, monthly usergroups, conferences, even LLMs… there are so many ways to learn these days. It’s fantastic! Because not everyone learns well from reading a book or just trying something. Not everyone learns well from attending a training session.

What I’ve noticed is that all these new ways of learning have caused the original way of learning to almost be lost. Having a teacher come in to teach a course or booking a seat on a classroom training. It’s something that rarely happens anymore. And I can sort of see why: Booking a course means committing one, two or even three(+) days to that course. It costs a set amount of money (either per student or per course). It’s cheaper to recommend some podcasts, get a subscription to Udemy or give someone a ChatGPT subscription. That also takes less time. I get that.

Advantages of the course

Actually attending a physical course with a trainer teaching you things does have certain advantages that all the other forms of learning don’t have. Let’s have a look at four of those advantages.

1. Focus

A lot of things are happening in your work, your life and the world. There are a lot of things that are constantly asking for our attention. Whether that is your manager, your social media notifications, your team or the latest BREAKING NEWS, keeping focus on learning is hard. And that while focussing on the topic at hand is instrumental in actually learning something. As Cal Newport wrote:

To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.

A physical teacher can not just be paused every time something asks for your attention. They can also see you and call you out on any distractions they might notice, adding motivation for paying attention and focussing on the material you are learning.

2. Interactivity

Most of the “modern” training options have no interactivity. There is material, and you can consume that material. You can not ask questions, or discuss certain topics. You get what you get. This can be nice because it’s predictable, but once you don’t understand something or would like to dive deeper into something, you’ll have to figure that out by yourself.

Having someone that delivers the content also allows you to ask questions, get clarification or even steer the content that you’re given into a certain direction (within the limits of the course).

This can be invaluable in understanding the topic and not getting stuck somewhere without knowing how to move forward.

3. Customization

In line with the previous point, customization is also great. With “standard” content such as a podcast, video tutorial or book, you get what you get. But when you book a training course for your team, the trainer will be able to prepare custom content for your team. If you book a PHPUnit Masterclass and your team has a pre-existing codebase, you can ask the trainer to use that for the exercises on testing untestable code instead of the default exercises. If you book a training on Docker and Kubernetes and your company uses a specific cloud provider, you can ask the course the be customized for that specific platform. This is priceless: Your team is getting exactly the content they need.

4. The hallway track

Do not underestimate the informal contact different students have during breaks when attending a training course. While the formal content of the course is of course very important, the social aspect of sharing experiences, lessons learned and also non-course-related topics is also very important. Your team can reflect, learn from each other and also get to know each other better. If you booked seats on an external classroom training, they can also do this with people with completely different background and experiences, which could make the learning experience even more extensive.

Book a course?

Nope. I’m not going to tell you that you should now immediately book a course. First of all, in previous years it seems that, especially in the programming world, courses have become rarer. They’re not offered as much anymore unfortunately. But what I do want to ask you is to seriously consider booking a course in case it is available for the topic that you or your team wants or needs to learn more on.