Soft Skills & Training

First of all, we need to identify what training is:

Training, whether it is academic or in the Soft Skills arena, can be defined as helping people to make permanent behavioral changes that measurably improve job performance.

That definition implies that it's incumbent upon us, as trainers, to know our audience before embarking on that life-changing experience from a trainee's perspective, and these audiences will be extensively handled in the later post.

So, the question is what can training do?

Training can simply impart knowledge, develop skills, and change attitude. At this juncture, we need to distinguish between 2 kinds of trainers, The Specialists, and The Non-Specialists or Generalists.

The generalists are those with a broad range of skills, who know quite a bit about a number of things. The specialist is the one to talk to when you want to teach people how to use PowerPoint, how to run a particular machine, or how to teach sign language, as examples. They have honed their skills in a particular area.

 Do you consider yourself as a Specialist or Generalist trainer?