Is Photography Training Worth The Money You Pay?

Part 1

A sensible look at spending money photography training and making sure you get a measurable return on investment. Is Photography Training Worth The Money You Pay - I'm writing this after a number of years spent running photography training courses myself and attending a couple of high profile events both in the UK and abroad.  What triggered my blog (and it may be be a series of blog posts on the subject of learning / training & development for photographers!) was a conversation on FaceBook about attending an 8 day event in Las Vegas - WPPI.

About WPPI - Wedding & Portrait Photographers International

This whole event (in 2016 at least) is from the 3rd March - 10th March.  It's in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand hotel.  It's big.  Bloody huge in fact. Ten's of thousands of photographers from all over the world will attend. In 2016 about 12,000 are expected. Its got "Master Classes" / "Seminars " / "Hands-On tutorials" / Exhibitions / Trade Stands etc etc.  Some of the world top wedding & portrait photographers attend etc. Cost if you book all the stuff going in advance is around £550.  That's without flights / accommodation / travel / meals etc  I'd expect the total cost for one person to be in the region of maybe £2k - £2.5k depending on how extravagant you are.

About my training & Development Experience

For those that don't know me my training qualifications & experience include:

• UK Military Train the Trainer (TTT) programme (6 week intensive course)
• Degree level Adult-Adult (1-1 / 1-many) training qualification
• Masters Level Coaching & Mentoring with the Institute of Leadership & Management
• Qualified to administer and use psychometric assessments from the British Psychological Society (BPS)
• 25 years of training experience within the British Military and National & International Blue Chip organisations.
• Includes 16 years of corporate training within the UK, USA, Europe, Middle East and Far East.
• Degree Level Photography Course (via British Army)

I've delivered training events from Nuclear Biological & Chemical Warfare to Shooting to Fibre Optic Communications to Media Awareness to Map Reading to Senior Level Leadership to Windows & Mac applications and software.  From Masters level down to GCSE level.  Worked with national governments in the UK and abroad, international banks (UK, EU and S. East Asia / Australasia), Pharmaceuticals, Oil & Gas, Transportation, Heavy Industry, Services etc. In short, without bragging, I know what I'm talking about when it comes to training people of all levels and abilities around the world. So back to my question...

Is Photography Training Worth The Money You Pay

To really answer this question I'm going to go back to my training & development background and rephrase the question: From "Is Photography Training Worth The Money You Pay?" to "What outcomes do you want to achieve from attending the training course?" Notice I used the word "Outcome" and not "Output". The Output from attending WPPI for instance would be stuff like:

• 10 days attendance at an event
• 4 workshops attended
• 1 photograph walk around attended
• 15 people met with and exchanged contact details with. (AKA Networking)
• 4 bits of camera / photography kit bought
• Got drunk with new friends 3 times

It's all about the numbers with Outputs; what we did. It is so much easier to justify spending £2k on a trip to Las Vegas and come back and say I attended 4 workshops and they were really good; and then think you got value for money.

So how about the "Outcome" ?

An outcome is something around what we do.  So in this case outcomes from attending WPPI could be:

1. What have you learnt?
2. What have you really understood now that you didn't previously?
3. How will this change your business; and when are you going to implement it?
4. How will this change you - your behaviours?

Notice the difference between the two?  One is soooo much more harder to really put an answer to - The Outcomes. And at it's basic level that is why people really don't pay much attention to outcomes when they attend photography training (or in most cases any other type of training event!).  Outcomes are harder to think about; harder to quantify and harder to measure. Now when I think of spending £2k I'm having to think of some hard answers to some hard questions.  And that's a good thing.  Spending £2k to most self-employed photographers is a lot of money. You should think, and think seriously, about what you want from spending that money.  It's called running a business and more importantly, it's called getting a Return on Investment (ROI).  I'll come back to ROI in future posts - it's really important. So important that no corporate business worth their salt, no education authority will NOT think about it. So lets look at each of the 4 areas (and I could have done a lot more areas) in a little bit more detail.

What Have I Learnt?

"Learning" - the acquisition of knowledge or skills through study, experience, or being taught. What Have I Learnt? - Oh my gosh what a tough one!  No, really.  This is a tough question.  Tough because you need to start thinking about HOW you learn before you can decide WHAT you have learnt! General research puts learning into four categories (Kolb / Honey & Mumford):

• Activists
• Theorist
• Pragmatist
• Reflector

I'll take and explain each in turn.

Activist.

Activists are those people who learn by doing. Activists need to get their hands dirty, to dive in with both feet first. Have an open-minded approach to learning, involving themselves fully and without bias in new experiences.

Theorist.

These learners like to understand the theory behind the actions. They need models, concepts and facts in order to engage in the learning process. Prefer to analyse and synthesise, drawing new information into a systematic and logical 'theory'.

Pragmatist.

These people need to be able to see how to put the learning into practice in the real world. Abstract concepts and games are of limited use unless they can see a way to put the ideas into action in their lives. Experimenters, trying out new ideas, theories and techniques to see if they work.

Reflector.

These people learn by observing and thinking about what happened. They may avoid leaping in and prefer to watch from the sidelines.  Prefer to stand back and view experiences from a number of different perspectives, collecting data and taking the time to work towards an appropriate conclusion. Info taken from University of Leicester These four together are called the Learning Cycle

The Learning Cycle

We will have a preference for one maybe two modes of learning.  This is out strongest style and the mode where we will learn most.  I'm an Activist.  So my preferred method of learning is essentially by doing it.  Getting out there and practising.  Cost me a fortune in the days of film; cheaper now with digital!! My second style is a Pragmatist.  This means I live in the real world and whilst I can understand esoteric concepts I always want to know how it wold work in the real world - and more importantly in my world.  Don;t try and persuade me to do something 0 show me and show me it working in the same environment I work / live / breathe in. [To fully 'learn' something however we ALL need to go though ALL of the four stages at some point.  It's not a matter of picking and choosing which you like; you just won't learn effectively (and going back to spending £2k on a training course you will waste you money.  More on that later). I know I need to have the theory and spend a lot of time reading about the theory and then putting it into practise.  I then spend time reflecting on the theory / practise and see what worked the way I thought it would and if I need to do it again with different parameters.  I'll tell you now - I hate reflecting.  Really.  It bores me to death.  But I know that I MUST do it to fully understand and hence LEARN something. To fully 'learn' YOU MUST go through each stage.  It's as simple as that.  Miss a stage out and you won't fully learn; you will only learn of it.  And when you're spending £2k learning only part of it is a waste of money.

Moving it forward, making it real.

So you paid £2k or so to go to WPPI.  Great!  You are at one of the training events.  With maybe another 100, 200, 300 or possibly 500 other photographers. Now say for example you're an Activist like me.  You are sitting in the middle few rows of a conference hall and have a great view, can hear really well.  And the training event starts. The photographer is a world class photographer and you really love his (or her!) work.  They start to talk about how they photograph weddings.  They show you some images.  They talk you though the emotions of the images.  They don't explain what settings they had, what ISO, what aperture etc.  They talk about emotions, about concepts. They go on for about an hour.  It's all about them; their work.  They don't check that people are understanding what they are saying.  They don't make much in the way of eye contact - in fact it's pretty impossible with so many other photographers in the room.  They don't pick up on body language from the people attending In short this isn't a training event.  It's a talk. That's it.  You paid £2k to attend a talk. It's not suitable for your learning style at all. To be honest it's probably not suited to any learning style.  Not much for theorists; not enough time for reflectors to think and then ask questions; certainly poor for activists and not a lot going on for pragmatists. (In fact an activist like me would have probably walked out to be honest. I did just that at a training event in Venice in 2013.  Not quite walk out, but just didn't turn up for that session. I knew it wasn't going to be anything more than a talk.) Now lets be real.  This isn't the fault of YOU.  It's the fault of the presenter / the tutor / the trainer and the event organiser. With no learning  Aims or Objectives or Learning Outcomes you rely on the PR spiel to give you a taste of what the session was about.  It's PR spin.  Without that photographer being trained in how to train people they miss out the learning styles; they don't cater for all the styles.  They don't understand the subtleties of body language (even if they could see everyone).  They don't ask questions to check understanding etc etc. The photographer giving the talk is not helping YOU go through the learning styles.  That's part of the job of a trainer - to help people who attend training courses to understand and learn!!!! In Part 2 I will look at more detail on the retention of 'learning' when in certain environments / situations.