Leading 'em through the wilderness
A friend once sent his profile
for a training opportunity, what it actually meant was how he qualifies to be a
trainer. I know him as someone who is a good coach, counsellor and one who can effectively
channelize aspirations of his subject. He has had long years of corporate life,
in Finance, Admin, HR, events, doubled up as an interviewer in radio shows,
wrote articles conducted events etc. He did send his profile but they never got
back, the profile it seems had vanished into a sink hole. I assume because he
did not have man hours of training experience to back him up in spite of all
above credentials and in spite of having done the ropes while in HR. This is
the fate of many otherwise experienced new comers into the field and most of
whom want to make a beginning with the business of training. This is how the
training world looks at them.
What is training? Training is
honing someone’s latent skills to make it effective enough for the world to use
as a product off the shelf. It is a method of awakening the self to make it
more productive. Training is also a reason to keep up the tempo, break the
monotony and infuse much needed energy into a being and a group. Training helps
infuse and transform centrally, scattered thoughts and aspirations into bursts
of actionable energy that keeps the production cycle steady. Training is the
process where delivery of information, helps in the transformation process of a
human being and in the process be reformed. In short training is all about
information, transformation and reformation. It is indeed training that helps
sagging shoulders revive to a stage where the recipients are propelled into
putting organisation over self, a mental state where they keep asking for more.
Training helps to discover one self- hitherto dormant and unknown desires surface
as a piece of floating object bobbing up and down amidst the ocean current and
tide.
We are all born with skills which
may pertain to many fields, an assorted array of fondness for a certain path
that needs a kind of awakening to lift it from a state of dormancy to a stand
attention mode and then gradually polishing it to shine luminously as a
soldiers boot reflecting the persons charisma and personality. This fondness
and curiosity is awakened at an early stage by our teachers, parents and
mentors, the lucky ones seem to find their peace early in life, but the
majority are still fiddling as would a learner with the strings of a guitar waiting
for the sweet sound of success.
People have spent an entire
lifetime chasing, or better still pushing jobs that have no semblance of
balance with their needs and awakens little that is dormant deep within them.
They are always yearning to break out like a butterfly from its cocoon. Yet
they keep ploughing on for lack of better alternatives and slowly ease into the
background with the satisfaction of having done their bit in life. You hear of
professionals leaving their high paying jobs early on to turn to farming, there
are others who have sacrificed cushy jobs to go out and teach and train people.
Joining NGO’s is the latest fad amongst the literate; the buzz word is
developmental management.
Training skills in any area needs
to start with the basics, the need to take a natural liking for the field. You
cannot take away a good teacher from his/her teaching job even if you were to
offer him/her a highly remunerative job in a different field as an alternative.
The reason is simple, for a teacher the satisfaction is the child being able to
grasp life’s lessons and see the child grow and mature into something in this
world. A teacher’s chest swells with pride when you mention that you have made
it as a former student of the teacher, when you meet them in person. Your
presence and a proclamation of your achievements are reflective of their score
card, the examinations for which they have given a long time ago and a good
teacher will never trade the moment for anything else in life.
As life progresses school and
college teachers/professor are replaced with corporate trainers in specific
moulds of life skills, like soft, technical, subject centric etc. The question
is who is a trainer? Or more pertinently who is an effective trainer? An
effective trainer will be one who has a fair grasp of the subject, knows how to
deliver it painstakingly and with absolute finesse to his students or trainees.
A trainer should be the Dronacharya in the classroom, and he must be able to
impart skills with ease, grasp and make it register in the hearts and minds of
his trainees not only for it to last long within themselves but also inculcate
the lessons into their daily work life. An
effective trainer is someone who can gather together pieces of wood and twigs
into a heap and light the fire to send succour to the eager ones both in direction
of thought and knowledge. He can both keep out the cold and light their lives
all with the lighting of the fire. Set up a Barometer within your employees to
measure the impact of training as a contributory factor to organisational
progress.
A trainer also must be able to
develop his own content for training by gathering different bits of information
to align in with his thoughts and insights. Not only does a trainer need to be
able to leave his imprint on the course and the material, it should be like a
boutique piece that which may have an uncanny resemblance to others but is
truly unique. His, must be a pioneering effort like the icebreaker ships cutting
through thick sheets of ice. Only if he can integrate the daily work life and
changing patterns combined with lessons from the past, can he effectively eke
out a useful lesson in training. To be a good trainer you have to be a good
observer of life as it passes you by. Blurting out a few lines and combining it
with a straight face and posing as a man of learning will not implant the
doctrines that a trainer ought to develop in training. A man of learning may
not essentially be a good trainer, but a trainer will always be a man of
learning who has incorporated life skills into his teaching and whose outreach
smacks of days in the sun.
You have to live life as a
trainer and it must start at home from your daily life of giving out advice to
your kids and others in the immediate family and turning them into success
stories. That is where a trainer’s life starts, which slowly percolates into the
neighbourhood, amongst friends and acquaintances, office routine, departments,
training in house and the like. In short for a trainer to be effective the
essential pre requisite is life’s experience, a fair call to all and sundry who
are preparing to turn trainers or are looking to hire them only on the basis of
man hours ploughed. On the contrary look out for that existent spark that can
be fanned with time to engulf larger areas thereby spreading its contours,
otherwise it will be akin to an oarsman splashing his oars with the boat tied
to the bank- an exercise in futility.27th August 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment