Being a Trainer is Like Being a Parent
I am about to be a Dad for the second time. Right about….now. My lady is full term and 5 days from the due date. We will be having a girl, the first girl in our family. Having this baby is of course very exciting. As I was working away today on the communication plan for our organization-wide training effort that will take place over the next couple of months, it occurred to me that being a trainer, at least a successful one, can at times be much like being a parent. This post will explore that idea and share ways to ensure your success in the field of workplace learning.
What can you do to be a successful workplace learning professional?:
1. Love Your Content as You Would Your Children
If you are like most trainers, you spend a considerable amount of time developing content of some type. Whether its agendas, speaking notes, activities, evaluations, simulations or CBT’s, you are knee deep in the process of content creation. Want good content? Take pride in and ownership of your content. After all, the content can make or break the learning experience. Once the content is complete and out there in the world, reactions to your content, whether good or bad, should have a personal affect on you. If it doesn’t, you don’t have pride in or ownership of the content.
2. Learners: Give Them Your All
Training Professionals all talk about “that one class” or experience they had when the learning environment was perfect, the learners were engaged and the training was truly absorbed. This happens when you treat your learners as you would your children. Your investment in the effective delivery of the content and the success of the learner will determine the success of the entire training effort. Even with the best content, if your delivery is flat and lacks energy and excitement, your learners will not be provided with the learning opportunity they came for. Over a long period of time this type of uninspired performance can be responsible for an overall negative attitude towards training. This can be a nightmare to overcome.
3. Set Your Expectations Higher
Have you ever heard parents of a toddler say “We’re hoping that [child's name] graduates from high school some day.”? This is as absurd as a training organization saying “We’re hoping that people will pass”, yet I here this time and time again. Whether or not a training objective is realized as a success or learners are able to demonstrate their knowledge is a direct reflection of the amount of effort put in to shape the experience. As mentioned above, OWN the content and the delivery, take pride in the success of your trainees and you’ll never worry about the outcome again.
4. Get Involved in Your Learners Lives or Lose Touch With Them
Classic scenario: Child hits teenage years and the parents pull their hair out. There’s fighting, hurt feelings and distance between parent and child. One way to prevent this is to stay involved in the child’s everyday life. The same goes within the organization. If your learning or training department is cordoned off from the front lines where skills, knowledge and attitudes are paramount, how will they know how to assist the learner? It makes no sense for a training department to be sitting and waiting for someone to point out a training opportunity. This only leads to a reactive department that cannot relate to the learner. This is also the type of situation that breeds contempt for training amongst employees. Constantly providing employees with training when upper management feels that they are not performing as well as they could will do nothing to endear the training team to the rest of the organization and even less content will be absorbed.
Follow these simple guidelines and you will find success. Whether you are a seasoned learning professional or just entering the field, devoting yourself to your product is a sure-fire way to ensure engaged learners, valuable training sessions and job satisfaction and security.
If you’re a regular reader be sure to check back, there’s going to be a baby announcement soon, I can feel it!
Tags: Content Development, elearning, learning, Matt Murray, Organizational Development, Training
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November 13, 2009 at 12:48 pm
This was a very well written article and I thank you for it. As a new comer to the instructional technology field I was looking through numerous websites for my assignment. Yours was a very easy and nice read that gave me plenty of ideas. As a third grade teacher in a low economic status school, this article also fits in with me teaching the little kids. I have to show pride in what I do or they are just going to lose focus and not care about their work. I will continue to follow your post and read up on past articles that you have written, and congrates on the baby
November 13, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Thanks Kyle! It’s great to hear from readers who find meaning in any post. The baby was born 11/7 and she is doing great. I haven’t posted in about a week but will be back in the swing next week. Hope to hear from you soon.
November 15, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Hi Matt,
Congrats on your new addition! I truly enjoyed your article. I felt as if it related directly to me in so many ways. I am a fairly new father myself. My son is 12 months and I was just promoted to a new career as a Senior Coordinator so I have to train my team as well. Upon reading your post I started to realize how training in a corporate environment and being a parent could relate. I have to constantly develop training scenarios for my team and keep them with the most up to date information. Since I am fairly learning two new positions lol, I will take your article and incorporate it into my daily activities as a father and a professional. I’m excited to see the outcome!
November 16, 2009 at 9:09 am
Well thanks very much! It’s good see to hear that the metaphor worked! I love hearing from folks in other industries as well. It confirms my thoughts that regardless of where you “train”, the principles remain the same. Thanks for the comment!
November 16, 2009 at 9:13 am
l love hearing from teachers! It’s great to hear that you are studying instructional design as well. I wonder what resources you are taking advantage of…. Perhaps the Too Much information” post would be helpful for you to connect with some good resources. Good luck and thanks for well-wishes.
November 15, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Hi Matt,
Also congratulations on the new addition! Also being a father of three I truly see the value in your comparison. In fact the old sying “you get out what you put in” is applicable here as well. I am so “green” when it comes to this field that this kind of comparison was a welcome revelation. I am also a high school teacher studying Instructional Design and I think the simple manner in which you present your thoughts can be valuable for my own growth in the field. In fact, I think you placed your thoughts in the perfect order as well, especially if you are not focused on these 4 steps all your efforts will be for naught Thank you.
December 31, 2009 at 6:10 am
Great post Mr. Murray. I especially agree with your point about the importance of strong delivery. I would argue that the damage caused to the trainer’s credibility as a result of repeated poor content delivery is permanent– thereby making the “overall negative attitude towards training” impossible to overcome without either changing trainers or trainees. Sometimes we get so caught up in the quality of our content, we neglect the details of our delivery. PowerPoint presentations are a great example of this. There is nothing I hate more than a presenter simply reading from slide to slide; I probably should be listening, but counting the ceiling tiles does a much better job of holding my attention. To me, this indicates that the speaker has not mastered their own information. KNOW the content, and use images instead of text as a trigger. Simply reading verbatim from an overhead also shows a clear misunderstanding of the audience I think. People don’t need subtitles, they need substance! Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy flying by the seat of my vintage pants from time to time, but walking into a new classroom with pile of content and planning to ‘wing it’ is suicide. Of course, you already know all of this. Great reading, and congratulations once more on the new addition to the family. Cheers!
January 3, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Thank you Mr. Divece! I have fought hard against the “Death by PowerPoint” method of training and your comment serves to steel my resolve. Hope you are well!