Ten Truths of Training

So you have done the course and done the practice. You have spent  hours writing your notes, polishing your Powerpoint presentations and rehearsing your delivery. You have worked hard to ensure that your lessons work with all learning styles. Here are some things that you probably won’t have learned but knowing them will  make your life as a trainer much easier...

Truth 1- there’s always one at the beginning of every class
At the beginning of every session, there is always someone who can’t find the folder/doesn’t know where to sit/hasn’t got the training materials that everyone else has . That’s just a reality – no matter how well you have prepared

Truth 2 – You can rely on technology until you really need it
Be assured that the day you do not bring the two memory sticks, an extra laptop and have been in early to check the projector will be the day those items will not work. Be assured of it and also, you will probably be late that day.

Truth 3 – Extra help given by you doesn’t equate to more appreciation from learner
You have helped that learner, explained everything many times over, stayed in over break with this person who is struggling to grasp a concept. You think this will be reflected in the evaluation given (surely they will give you an Excellent). Wrong. They usually give you one of the worse evaluations. After all, if you were any good, they wouldn’t have had to struggle.

Truth 4 – Effort and evaluations do not equate
One day you cruise in, deliver on autopilot, move briskly along and basically put in minimal effort. (Yes, I know that only happens after you are in recovery from pneumonia/smallpox/Ebola virus). Everyone raves about you and marks everything you do as excellent. You deliver training the following week in which you sweat blood, use every possible exercise and prop and guess what...learners rate your performance as “good� or worse still...average. Yuck. Then the opposite happens the following week..

Truth 5 – there’s always one (or two) who just don’t get it and need personal help
Yes, you have explained the concept in 5 different ways, using all the senses (telepathy as well sometimes). You have used copious examples. But there will always be someone who needs you to go down and give them a personal explanation...so you go down and repeat yourself.

Truth 6 – Village Idiots and Experts
This truth applies even if you only have a group of three. One of them will be an expert i.e. they know quite a bit already and the best way to handle them is to acknowledge their expertise from the beginning. There will be a village idiot (a politically incorrect name for the person who takes longer than anyone else to grasp what is going on).  A good idea is to let the expert help out the village idiot.

Truth 7 – If you are good at it, everyone thinks it’s easy and anyone can do it
If you are a natural or experienced trainer, the chances are you make it look pretty effortless. But it’s the same sort of easy that comes to professional athletes. Many hours of effort have gone into that ease. Many non-trainers therefore assume that it is easy and can often be dismissive of it. It can be a shock to them to actually have to deliver some training and find that it’s not as easy as it looks.  Great training is a beautiful example of Hemingway’s courage: grace under pressure.

Truth 8 – No other job gets evaluated as often
Those of you who are not trainers I want you to imagine this. Every day you do a piece of work, the people around you fill out a piece of paper assessing you on how you did. They can pretty much write anything they want to on this.( I had one woman complain that I used red markers to write on the whiteboard because there might be colour blind people in the class...this was at the end of the days when I had written on it several times.) If you are not above average all the time, you get brought in for questioning.  No matter how good you are, what gets commented on are the times you didn’t score highly.

Truth 9 – there’s no high like a training high
It’s hard to explain what satisfaction there is in watching comprehension dawn on a learner’s face as they really really “getâ€� something.  Or the pleasure that comes from someone telling you that something they have learned from you is going to make a real difference in their lives. Now, that’s a real high.

Truth 10 – you just have to do it – it’s your DNA
If you are a trainer, the chances are you love it, despite everything. You know at some level it’s what you were born to do. In fact you have been asked to teach/train things from the time you were young!

Anne Walsh