Effective Trainings:

As professionals, we all attend sundry types of trainings, ranging from hardcore technical trainings to soft-skills workshops. I myself have attended numerous trainings, and my experience has been rather pathetic. I have relished just a handful of trainings in my career of 7-years.

In this conversation, we look at what makes a training effective.

1. Who enrols? Why?
At times, I have seen engineers being asked by their managers to attend a particular training. In other cases, the engineers enrol for a particular training to take an off from work. In both these cases, the point is that the attendee does not have any reason to attend the training. He does not know clearly his objectives.

2. What is the topic? Who teaches?
Most often, the topic is not stated in simple enough words. Few days back, I attended a workshop on "Assertiveness Skills" from the British Council. I had earlier attended the workshop of "Effective Communication Skills." I was disappointed to find some exercises and text being common across these two different trainings. I wasted a part of my time.

Another problem is that the training co-ordinator does not provide the details of the trainer. I have seen people enrolling for trainings just because they are impressed by the credentials of the trainer.

3. Feedback?
I am not sure how often the training co-ordinator takes feedback from the trainer. Typically, the trainees are requested to fill a feedback form, that in itself is pretty limited. Although the feedback form is a step in the right direction, it will not help us reach the goal.

4. Rotate trainers for the same topic.
I believe that to be a good learner, we should be a good teacher. In my college, I used to teach my gang a particular topic. That helped me remember the topic very well, because my gang asked me hell lot of Qs, and I had to answer them. I did good research on the subject and left a few open-issues so that my dear pupils may exercise their grey cells.

After teaching, I think the next best way to learn something is by writing it (read: typing it). The objective is that we should be able to organize our thoughts and learnings, and the best way to do that is to communicate our learning to others... through either verbal communication or typed/written communication.

5. Get precise.
At times, the training material is not very well composed. It tries to beat about the bush, and state the same point again and again. Worse, the trainer keeps bouncing back to the old concepts that he has already taught. The training material needs to be very crisp. Simple and short declarative sentences. Weed out unncessary words.