Back in ancient times when music came on CD (remember that, kids?), the trend was to stuff as much music as possible onto a single, 74-minute disc. As the forward march of technology expanded the quantity of how music could be stored on playable media (vinyl LPs could handle about 45 minutes), people adapted with it and used this flexibility, for better or worse. Sometimes there was no need to consider the extra space granted by the medium—for instance, if Led Zeppelin IV took up about 42 minutes on the vinyl LP format it was originally engineered for, well that’s how long it is, regardless of conversion to a later cassette or CD format. But would another 30 available minutes of musical real estate have made Led Zeppelin IV a “better” album if it was released in 2001 on CD instead of 1971?

I’m comparing apples to oranges here, speculating about the product of one set of technologies compared to another set of technologies 30 years later. There’s no way to truly compare the two when technology changes the yardstick, and “longer” has never been remotely synonymous with “better” in this regard. This same concept applies to corporate training, despite the popularity of looking at “time spent in training” as a proxy for all manner of things other than merely “time spent not working.”

In the last 30 years, we’ve witnessed an explosion of different modalities being used in the delivery of training to employees. The availability and accessibility of training content is greater than it ever has been, thanks to the use of technology, and we have e-learning, virtual classrooms, videos and mobile learning that can either supplant, augment, or support traditional instructor-led training (ILT). The gold standard of comparison for most of us, however, is still ILT, despite the fact that forms of virtual training have been steadily creeping up on the dominance of the in-person training classroom. While L&D functions have adapted some training evaluation metrics to account for new learning technologies, the common metrics we rely on were largely developed in the era of ILT and may be increasingly subject to interpretive problems. One of the more susceptible metrics is the time spent engaged in training activities, typically measured in hours. What often gets overlooked is the relationship between why hours are used as a metric and what those hours actually represent. From an ILT context, these hours historically represent “butts in seats,” to use the L&D patois, as a way to ensure that a minimum requirement was met (e.g., the eight hours of annual refresher training required for OSHA’s HAZWOPER standard). We also know from cognitive psychology research that there are tangible differences between massed versus distributive/spaced learning. If training materials are presented in one marathon session, as is often the case with ILT, it has been found that learners are less likely to be able to apply and generalize that content to novel situations. In most cases it is optimal for training materials to be presented in chunks, spaced out over time, in order to maximize retention. So in an age where a wide array of technology is at L&D departments’ disposal, and some forms of these modalities can be self-paced and learner-controlled, how relevant is the concept of training hours? I don’t have a definitive answer to offer that could apply to all companies in equal measure, but consider the following questions:

• Did a learner who can complete a training activity 30 minutes faster than most of their peers learn less? Is his or her training incomplete in some way because it took less time than it was intended to?
• In a learner control context, is a learner who completed four hours of material in one sitting equivalently trained when compared to a learner who covered the same material for 45 minutes per day over four days? (Hint: the distributed learning may yield better retention, even though the learner only spent three cumulative hours in training.)
• Is an equivalent but more expensive training activity that takes half the time for learners to complete virtually worth the upfront cost compared to a cheaper alternative that requires twice as much classroom time? (And as a result, could have higher indirect costs?)
• What useful information can actually be gleaned from relying on a benchmark for training hours that fails to account for economies of scale, differences between training requirements across industries, the use of different modalities, and on-the-job learning?

Just how does Led Zeppelin IV figure into this, again? The parallel is that an extra 30 minutes of album filler is the same thing as an extra 30 minutes of available training time—both may be largely superfluous, add negligible value (if any), and are likely to be interpreted as such by the intended audience. A training that can be done in two hours through a combination of e-learning and a virtual classroom, when an “equivalent” ILT session would take four hours, is neither “two hours worse” by comparison nor would it necessarily benefit anyone by bolting on more content to make it last longer. It is content that ultimately matters, not necessarily duration. Besides, “Stairway to Heaven” already takes too long to listen to.