Well-trained personnel is an important success factor for any company in the market. What makes your employees well-trained? Relevant training courses. Training is an active educational program that includes exercises, feedback and role playing to upgrade the spontaneous behavior in a natural or simulated atmosphere. Short segments of theory may be offered, too. But the training primarily remains an experiential event where participants exchange and receive immediate experience. This experience differs from the one acquired in actual life by being specially selected and structured to be better absorbed at the training. While learning by "trials and errors" may take months, a person may acquire the same experience at a well-structured training in a couple of days. Business trainings have long become the leading educational method known for the efficiency in transferring knowledge into skill.
To create and conduct business training you will need a professional trainer. Unlike a traditional teacher, a trainer needs more than knowledge (training materials) and presentation techniques. This difficult work requires from a trainer additional competences. The most important among them are:
technical competence: ability to transform the tasks required by the company (usually in terms of a desired outcome) into a system of relevant educational interactive exercises;
interpersonal communication competence: advanced verbal and non-verbal communication skills, sensitivity to group processes and ability to interpret them, high level of personal awareness, understanding of other people's motives;
contextual competence: comprehension of the social context in which the profession operates. In other words, a competent trainer must understand where and who he teaches and adapt to the setting;
adaptive competence: ability to anticipate and accommodate changes in profession, to discern and adjust to changing conditions inherent in practicing the trainer's role in a dynamic, rather than static, organizational culture;
conceptual competence: understanding those generally accepted foundations of knowledge that are indispensable for practical trainer's work;
integrative competence: trainers are integratively competent if they are capable to make informed professional judgments that include reasoning, decision making, problem solving, and meld all above competences to shape a practice-oriented professional.
What is the actual state of affairs?
A trainer in the Russian market is mostly a former teacher or psychologist who has been through a short re-training course. Sometimes the basic education of a trainer lies in another area altogether and would not help with such "minute details" as general leaning mechanisms and group dynamics. Frequently, companies would hire as a trainer anyone with fluent English, presentable appearance and glib performance while repeating ready-made standard company educational programs.
Those who work for specialized training companies are somewhat better off in a sense that their professional experience expands with each conducted training. On the down side is the fact that they never make follow-ups on their trainings, and as a rule never develop long-term projects. The organizations that invite trainers usually prefer short contracts and "taste-it-all" approach since the market of training services is fairly saturated by now. It's common knowledge that those who worked at large corporations and lacked personal or professional growth frequently decide to try their hand at free-lance training.
Many highly technically and interpersonally competent trainers experience the lack of "professional durability" which can only be achieved through a special training aimed at developing all six components of professional competence. The effective integration of above six aspects is best attained at "train the trainer" programs.
A company may significantly benefit from retraining its trainers, or hiring solid professionals. The only question to be raised at this point is whether additional professional preparation would make a trainer overqualified for the specific work to be done within a company.
The answer is emphatic no. Apart from acquired competences real professionalism presupposes the need to instill certain attitudes with which all professions must equip their members. Among them are
career marketability, the need to realistically access and adapt to the market;
professional identity, the degree to which a person shares and internalizes the norms of the profession;
ethical standards;
scholarly concern for improvement, the degree to which one recognizes the need to increase the knowledge in the profession through research. This attitude is well-developed if a professional knows and supports the research required to improve the base of knowledge of the profession;
motivation for continued learning.
What difference does it make for a company if its trainer has acquired all the necessary competences and professional attitudes?
Firstly, such person feels adequate to the job, he or she possesses sufficient inner resources to properly tackle the problem as formulated by the company.
Secondly, such specialist is flexible and adaptable to future challenges inherent to any dynamically growing organization. Such trainer develops stable self-esteem and does not fear objective evaluation of his or her work. A clear professional identity helps such person cooperate with other trainers. For instance, a professional trainer realizes the need to invite another "narrow specialist" to perform a specific task and helps select such an expert for the company: a company trainer is too professional and confident to claim he can accomplish everything with no outside assistance. Moreover, such trainer is interested in upholding prestige of the profession and not only personal position in a company; a reputation within a professional community is as important as job references.
Professionalism naturally leads to specialization. Thus, any professional trainer is well-informed of the tendencies, prices and newsmakers in the market of trainer's services.
Together with the personnel department professional trainers help formulate the educational requirements in the company, short- and long-term plans for personnel training and upgrading. As a result, a well-informed demand for trainers' services is developed in the market and gradually the "cure-all" trainings that offer to remedy any problem and teach anything to anybody in two days disappear from the marketplace.
The advantages of interactive training are so obvious that it became the leading educational method in business. Interactive training is now making its debut at the huge Russian market. Trainers with sufficient professional "durability" and growth potential will be the first to start creating a new Russian corporate culture.
