Barnaby,
You are indeed fortunate if you went through ATC training easily, the majority find it a very stressful experience - all because of the way it is done. The major problems are the need to learn multiple work methods to satisfy different instructors' requirements and, most importantly, the fact that there is a time limit to training. In that, ATC is unique in the world. Training for any other profession, people know that, if the worst happens and they fail an exam, they can take extra lessons and re-sit. ATC trainees have their entire career hanging on every exam, and that is incredibly stressful for most. As I said, you are blessed if you didn't experience it.
What VV Approach does is teach people a structured operating model, one the student will have perfected over probably hundreds of hours of practice before they enter formal training, either abinitio or cross-stream to Approach Radar. Once solid subconscious processing of traffic has been mastered it is very easy to adapt to variations to the model. Look at what Flight Simulator and its associated training packages have done for pilot training and relate it to ATC. Never before has that been done and that is why ATC training is so outdated.
alfaman,
Could I just ask that you broaden your thinking. There is no suggestion that people train by CBT then lob for an examination. That will never occur, just like no pilot gets a licence without many hours of actual flying. But the skills required to do that flying can in part be learned from Flight Sim and the like, saving the student countless expensive lessons and allowing him/her to develop sound subconscious skills before ever taking a formal lesson. Also, it gives him/her that vital and elusive quality confidence - they can see they have mastered the most difficult job in ATC - complex sequencing of high-speed aircraft - and nothing that formal training asks of them will seem difficult. No trainee pilot ever has any difficulty adapting pre-learned skills to what a live instructor tells them to do, they have learned an operating model upon which they build.
Thank you both for this discussion, you raise the very issues that need to be addressed if ATC training is ever to be modernised.
CLAMES