Training disasters

In every trainers life, training disasters happen. Rather than being bogged down by the resulting negative consequences, the trainer needs to learn valuable lessons from such experiences. A trainer undergoing a training disaster can draw some solace from the fact that almost every trainer has gone through or suffered disasters at the hands of learners at some time or the other.

Let’s examine some of these disasters and extract critical learning points from them.

An organization in the textile industry was facing an acute shortage of engineering talent. This was resulting in the rapid increase of technical manpower cost. So, the organization decided to create a new pool of technical personnel by hiring and training competent fresh graduates. So, an elaborate technical training program was drawn up. Multiple batches of freshers were selected for the program. The training program was conducted by the engineering professionals working on the shop floor. During the training program, trouble started brewing. One of the technical trainers said to the learners, “My parents paid for my engineering course for 4 years. Why should I train you?

There were situations, when a trainer would proceed on leave, with the learners hanging in suspended animation. Finally at the end of the course, a test was given to the participants to assess their learning levels. Thereafter, on the job training started. In this period there was continuous grapevine about the step childntreatment meted out to the trainees. No visible remedial action was taken.

After one year of the program not a single trainee was to be found in the organization. All had left.

An analysis of this case of training disaster yields the following insights:

• Selection of trainers :The assignment of training areas to engineering personnel was done on the basis of their technical competence and position in the hierarchy. Their training competencies were not taken into consideration. The result was that most of them did more damage than good. Either the learners were demotivated or bored or forced to passivity or alienated. The parameters that should have been utilized for selecting the trainers are :
• Training competence (essential)
• Emotional intelligence (vital)
• Technical competence (vital)
• Leadership competence (desirable)
• Briefing of trainers: There was no formal briefing of the trainers.No laying down of norms of the duties and responsibilities. Thus, there was no shared mental pattern with respect to the training objectives and the training process. The result was an obvious misalignment between the focus of the training program and that of the trainers.
• Training of Trainers : We can not just pick up engineering professionals from the shop floor and harness them in the job of trainers and expect them to perform. The mindsets required at the shop floor are quite different from the one’s required in the training room. These personnel end up treating the participants in an aggressive manner which appears offensive to the callow eye of the greenhorn.

  Therefore, training of trainers in the areas of the competence development process, facilitation skills, competence assessment and emotional intelligence is a prerequisite to having a successful training program.

• The competence development process : The training program was designed like a typical college course. It was structured in the form of modules with each module corresponding to one part of the production process. The training was divided into 2 months of structured theory classes in a training room, to be followed by ,” On the job training” without any structure.

  This Competence development plan turned out to be disastrous. Neither did it trigger competence development nor did it catalyze integration into the organization culture.

  Rather than the program being split up into two distinct groups of theory and On the job training, there was an opportunity to integrate the two during a working day, thereby catalyzing competence development. Thus, knowledge acquisition and application could happen simultaneously. Moreover, the trainees would get an opportunity to interact with shop floor workers and supervisors regularly thereby catalyzing the development of communication links in the workplace. This process would have triggered the integration of the trainees into the shop floor culture thereby reducing their alienation.

  From the competence development point of view, this program was a great opportunity which went amiss because the training resources in terms of machinery , coworkers, co learners, supervisors were all present but they never got utilized to enrich the learning experience.

• Program focus : The focus of the program is a key determinant of program quality. The program focus in this case, continued to be subject areas aligned to different sections of the workplace. It never shifted to the development of specific competencies required by these technical personnel on the shop floor. The frame blindness littered by the systems of program delivery in institutes was omnipresent through and through the program.

  If the focus had shifted to identification and development of competencies expected to be practiced, it would have had a cascading effect on all elements of the program.

• Assessment : The participants were assessed on the basis of their responses to a question paper. I don’t know when we are going to get out of this mental prison of assessing personnel in exams. There was an opportunity in this case to assess the competencies of the participants as exhibited during on the job training. At least in organizations, we need to shift from assessing “cramming ability’ to ‘application competence’.
• Mentoring : After the training program , the trainees were let out, into the big bad world of the shop floor without any anchors. The result was visible in the failure of the program altogether.

  Assigning non hierarchical mentors to the participants for a period of one year after the program, could have turned the situation around.

  All the points discussed above indicate that successful training program takes diligence. It is easy to do a slipshod job of it and then let the looseness of the process obfuscate the absence of Return on investment.

  This is the first of the training disasters that we shall examine in a series in this column.