Vocational Trainer? Really?

You are a Captain of Industry, an Entrepreneur, a CEO, an Operational Director, a Project Manager?

So am I.

You could not live with the existing status quo any longer. You had to engage your company into a strong organisational change. You had no choice.

Change hurts.

Together with your executive board, you have analysed your team's skills gaps.

You have defined a Strategic Training Plan.

You have allocated fine resources.

Consensus is here: CEO, Finance, HR, Sales, Marketing, Production Supply Chain, Safety directors are all on the same page.

This does not happen that often.

Talent Management Team is ready to engage the right middle line managers into the right programme with the right trainers and the agreement of their lines directors who promised to mentor their mentees, coach their coachees.

Great! Everything will be fine.

Well, all seemed so, until THAT return on investment evaluation that did not match your expectations!

Until THAT resistance to change that you were not expecting, until THAT inopportune labor and tax departments visits that you will not enjoy.

The programme was well designed, well financed, well supported.

What went wrong?

Let us share with you a series of questions.

They come from our experience, some of the glitches that we have recently seen and somehow experienced in recent training programmes, for ourselves and some of our clients.

1. Did the trainers understand your industry's realities before moving onto the training delivery?
2. They flew business class all right but, did they volunteer wearing uncomfortable PPE's in your facilities, on the drilling site.
3. Did they ask to visit and discuss on the job production challenges with the workers and their line managers?
4. Did they try to understand the stress workers daily go through, walk in the same mud, eat the same food, drink the same brew, scare the same anopheles mosquito?
5. Did they assess actual needs and behaviours, did they show cross cultural intelligence?
6. Did they identify hazards, safety loopholes and stress with their own eyes, far from text books?
7. Did they fill the hazard report sheet?
8. Did they really understand the challenges you face in the strategic development your organisational change? Did they link them to operational life in the production units?
9. Did they understand the challenges your team members face, the hardship, the structural changes they are living through? Did they show emotion if not emotional intelligence?
10. Oh, and by the way, have they any experience in your industry, the topic they facilitated or assessed?

10 (honest) yes answers? The problem is somewhere else.

Less than 7 (very honest) yes answers:

• You got trainers who teach. They do not communicate.
• They did not team with your team because they are not team.
• They did not walk with the trainee, learn from him as much as the trainee learns from him.
• They did not learn about your industry.
• They are and will be strangers.
• Trainees will never ask them to be friends on Facebook!
• You will never call them back.

That's not fair! Let's make it right.

Responsible trainers should deliver more than classroom stuff, useless acronyms, and weird models. (How can we equally translate and interpret "SMART objectives" into Khmer, Italian, Lao, Suaheli, Mandarin, French or Bahasa Indonesia?)

Prior to starting any training action, responsible trainers should request strategic and operational inductions, understand the Leaders perspectives, the Management constraints, then adjust to their Trainees work environment and realities.

Far from a formality, this induction should be stage one of the training programme, task one of the Work Breakdown Structure of your training project management schedule:

• Get trainers on board and understand the business’ ways of working,
• Make sure they can get into the trainees shoes, even for only a short while. Let them feel the heat,
• Set first goal of the program as ITT ?Induct The Trainer? to the reality of work life.

Who say goals says measurement, right?

• Make the trainer define his own goals, build his KPI and commit to them.
• Help him meet the challenge, help him integrate the team. You are team also!
• Do not trap him, assess him!

At Strategic Network and Development Ltd. we believe that

“Trainers with continuous hands-on operational experience may qualify to deliver efficient management and technical training.

Pure academics and theories should have no place in industrial Vocational Training.”

www.strategicnetwordev.com