A while ago, I was discussing with a good friend of mine, and we were talking about mandatory tutoring. You know? That situation when the company decides a group of people needs a certain skill, pays for a consultant to deliver the training, and then everyone attends during working hours. For a whole set of reasons, this constitutes about 80% of my current revenue. Which is fine. I love this kind of project. The problem arises when some of these parameters aren’t respected, and sometimes I get requests from clients who:
- want their people to pay for the course themselves;
- want their people to attend the course outside working hours.
And listen, I get why this might happen. The train of thought that generates this kind of situation is the following: people working in a design or engineering firm often aren’t formally employees but de facto employees, freelance consultants who agree to stay every day, during working hours, without a specific work attached to their contract, and work on whatever’s needed. Yeah, I know. That’s not the point.
The point is that, being formally freelancers, they’re expected to be competent on whatever the client needs them to do. In the mind of the client, therefore, they’re doing them a favour to select a consultant who can provide such a training and to organise the class, but it goes without saying that a freelancer should pay for their own competency.
This is bullshit.
Let’s unpack why.
Competency vs Attendance Requirements
I completely agree that a consultant should be competent on whatever the client needs. Hence, if a company wants to shift from a design authoring tool to another, for instance, they have two options:
a) look for new consultants that are competent in the new tool and dismiss the old consultants, thus dismissing also the years of inside knowledge and competence they have accumulated in the firm’s internal processes and formal language (not recommended);
b) draft specifications on what the new skill should look like, and a deadline for acquiring it.
Now, if we all agree that the company has a benefit in not adopting strategy a, it should also go without saying that the company should enable their consultants to acquire the new skill, and this might mean:
- directing them towards a selection of suitable courses, in various formats, that might allow them to acquire the new skill according to specifications;
- giving them time to acquire and hone the new desired skill (because people can’t learn while they’re under pressure from a deadline).
While you’re selecting courses and giving them time to attend them, you might as well run one in-house, and you want your consultants to attend your training, of course, so the logical track of action is that you pay for it, and run it during working hours. The required paradigm shift is: you’re not forcing your consultants to attend, at their own expense and in their own free time, a course you selected; you’re encouraging people to attend the course you think is best by offering it as a benefit and running it at a convenient time.
Of course, in this scenario, some people might decide not to attend your course and attend some other course. It might be because the format doesn’t suit them: not everyone enjoys a synchronous course, for instance, and some people might be more reflective, preferring to tinker with the tool themselves. Which, guess, what? Is fine. This means that the company should have a way to assess whether the skills have been acquired or not, independently of their attending a course, and trust me, this alone would change the way many trainers approach technical training.
Ok, and then what?
Here’s where the conversation with my friend actually got interesting, because it’s easy to stop at “pay for it, run it during working hours, problem solved.” It isn’t. Once you accept that attendance is a benefit and not an obligation, you inherit a whole new set of problems, and most companies still trip on these.
Pitfall 1: “Optional” that isn’t
The moment training is scheduled during working hours and paid for, it stops feeling optional when a manager is sitting in the front row taking notes, or the calendar invite comes from someone three levels up. Nobody has to say “you must attend” out loud. Social pressure does the coercing for free. If a company genuinely wants attendance to be a choice, it has to actively engineer the absence of pressure: no manager attendance-tracking, no informal “so, will I see you there?” in the corridor, no consequences, implicit or explicit, for the people who opt for the tinkering-alone route or other courses instead. Make sure you don’t mix autonomy and well-dressed surveillance.
Pitfall 2: the “One format” problem
Offering “a course” and calling it a benefit doesn’t automatically accommodate different learning styles: it just moves the obligation from mandatory to strongly encouraged, while leaving the format exactly as ill-fitting as before. A three-hour synchronous session with a live instructor is fantastic for some people and actively hostile to others: some people are reflective, they need to sit with a concept before asking a question; some people learn by breaking things and reading the error message; other people would rather have a reference document open in one tab and the software in the other. If the only option on the table is attend-the-course-or-do-it-yourself, you haven’t offered autonomy, you’ve offered a single door and a note saying it’s unlocked.
Real autonomy means the specification (what people need to know by when) stays fixed, but the path there is genuinely plural: the in-house course as one lane among several, self-paced material, vendor documentation, peer mentoring, a sandbox environment with sample files and no deadline breathing down anyone’s neck. The company’s job shifts from “deliver the training” to “curate a set of credible paths and make sure people know they exist”.
Pitfall 3: Trial by Assessment
Imagine this: you say attendance is optional, you build alternative paths, and then the only way to demonstrate the skill is a test based on the course content, written by the person who ran the course, covering exactly what was said in the room. Congratulations, you’ve reinvented mandatory attendance with extra steps. If the deliverable is to prove you can produce a compliant model in the new tool, then the assessment has to be built around the output, not around whoever sat through which slides. A practical task, a real file, a checklist tied to the firm’s actual standards, works for everyone regardless of how they got there. A quiz that only makes sense if you were in the room on Tuesday works for nobody who wasn’t.
Pitfall 4: Time to attend vs. Time to learn
Blocking three hours on a calendar for the course is not the same as giving people time to acquire a skill. Learning by tinkering, by reflection, by failing and trying again, takes longer than a scheduled session, and it doesn’t show up as a line item anyone can point to. If a company pays for a course and calls the job done, the people who chose the self-paced route are, in practice, doing unpaid overtime to hit the same deadline the course-attendees met inside working hours. Autonomy without protected time for the alternative paths just relocates the burden instead of removing it.
Pitfall 5: The trainer’s incentive
I’ll say this one against my own interest, because somebody should: a trainer who’s paid to fill a room has a quiet incentive to make the room feel indispensable. To imply, even gently, that the “real” understanding only happens live. Good training design resists this. It should make itself replaceable, hand out the material, document the reasoning, build things people can revisit without the trainer in the room, because the goal isn’t attendance but competence. If a course is only valuable while it’s being delivered synchronously, it’s a performance, not a skill transfer.
Bottom Line: Autonomy at the Centre
None of this is an argument against running in-house courses. I run them, for fuck’s sake, I like running them, and for a lot of people, a well-designed synchronous session genuinely is the fastest and most humane way to a new skill. The argument is against turning them into obligations at people’s expenses and against mistaking a well-intentioned benefit for a solved problem.
If people are freelancers, they should be free (it’s in the name) to attend whatever course they want, change their workplace if they don’t want to learn the new skill, offer different approaches, negotiate their positions. Period.
If the company wants to offer its freelancers a course, that’s what they should be doing: offer it.
But autonomy is the principle, and if it’s actually the principle, the company’s real job is threefold, and it has nothing to do with organising a class:
- specify the competency instead of the attendance: write down what people need to be able to do, by when, in terms of output, not seat time;
- offer plural, genuinely equivalent paths, and mean it: no path should be socially or professionally cheaper than another;
- assess the skill, not the course: if your evaluation only makes sense for people who attended, you haven’t built alternatives but decoys to sort out the rebels (and fuck you if you do).
Do this, and the in-house course stops being a disguised obligation and becomes what it was supposed to be all along: one good option among several, offered by people who trust their consultants enough to let them get there their own way.
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