I was looking online and saw an ad for Master Class, an online site that has celebrities like Steve Martin teaching you comedy and Annie Leibovitz teaching you photography. It seemed interesting. Then I saw the videos about basketball and tennis, and I lost all hope that this was a good idea. Here’s why.
A few years ago I had this guy working for me, let’s call him Jim. Jim was a wonderful worker and would always present the most important information at our meetings. His one problem was that he wasn’t a dynamic speaker. This wasn’t a big problem. I’m at a big company and we have public speaking classes. I myself had learned how to be a better speaker at this company. So I called HR.
“I want to get some public speaking training for Jim. Maybe he could take a public speaking class? I took one last year,” I asked.
“We don’t offer that anymore,” she said.
“You don’t offer the class anymore? What do you have instead?” I asked.
“We have decided to move to more online training. The world is moving to much more of a ‘training-on-demand’ culture — like YouTube. We have a number of online classes that teach you how to speak in public from the basic to the advanced level.”
“You realize that public speaking is something you need to practice,” I said. “It’s not something you can learn from a book.”
Crickets.
I learned that there was a Toastmasters group at work that met informally and told Jim to join that instead.
When I told a co-worker this story, he said that it’s like saying “You don’t know how to swim? I have this fantastic PowerPoint deck on swimming. Once you read it just jump into the deep end of the pool. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”