Difference between training, education, and learning?

Learning is a biological process. It's something we do all of the time, whether or not we're aware of it. It's like breathing. It's something we do. 

Training is usually something we do to or for others to help them increase proficiency in a skill or help them feel better about doing it. We can engage in training independently, usually classed as practice and consisting of repetition or rehearsal -- possibly the best and most critical parts of a good training regimen. 

Training is usually associated with a task. If training is not focused on a skill associated with performance of a task, I completely agree with you -- it's a presentation or information session. Presentations and information sessions can help when training a skill or making folks feel better about performing the task, but these alone will probably fall far short of changing behavior or moving the needle toward accomplishment. Concepts need to be connected with the skill all the way through to the accomplishment to be effective. Concepts fade fast when not connected with practice.

Education, to me, is about connecting dots in a domain and providing a "sense of a world", whatever world is the focus of the education. Education tends to answer the Why? questions where training answers the How? and When? questions. There is overlap as how, why, and when don't exist in isolation, but thinking about the weights - these make sense intuitively. I don't remember who said this about the comparison between education and training but it stuck with me. 

• Most of us don't think twice about our kids getting sex education in school. But we would likely have a serious problem with them participating in a sex training course.

I propose a level higher than training. We focus a lot of energy on training (and focusing mostly on skills and technique) when (I believe) what we really want is development of capacity. And thinking in terms of capacity development broadens the range of effects beyond skills. We likely agree that capacities like confidence, connection, insight, perspective, grit, empathy are great work characteristics. When we focus on training, we might hit confidence and could touch on a few of the others, but how often do we do that? Some of these are purported as the aim of education (insight, perspective, connection.) 

Development of capacity is the outcome of both training and education. The type of development depends on the experience. We've started to put together a list of development ideas across six categories:

• Discover
• Achieve
• Connect
• Apply
• Create
• Lead

These extend the experience beyond the standard LMS and corporate practice standard fallback of solo and one-to-many to include a broad spectrum of social contexts (and different types of conversations). 

• Solo
• One-to-one
• One-to-many
• Many-to-one
• Many-to-many
• Team
• Association
• Organization
• Society
• World

When we set sights higher than training (or even education) and break the default patterns, we can focus on what really matters. It's not the content. It's readiness to meet the challenge. There are a ton of opportunities we can use to 1) help optimize the path to readiness and 2) get the heck out of the way and let folks work their own learning magic:)