Teachers and Trainers

The Beer:  Some IPA I found here in Arkansas

The Bicycle:  An injury over the weekend is keeping me off my trusty steed

The VRWC:  The goal of the trainer in industry is to prove that he or she is smarter and trickier than the student.  In order to do this, there are some basic rules to follow:

1.   Never emphasize any information during the training session.  This allows the trainer to throw out any question on the quiz, throwing the student off.
2.   In an oral exam, always throw out your hardest question first.  This can sink the student quickly, sparing the trainer the need to actually evaluate the student.
3.   Always be condescending in the classroom and never, ever offer extra help.  Make the student feel as small as possible.  If they have any hope at all, it must be crushed.  If the student is struggling, you don't need them
4.   Use trick questions as much as possible.  This is critical for showing the student how much smarter and trickier the trainer is.

  I hope that this information is useful to all you trainers out there.

OK.  So, You probably wonder where this comes from.  If you have been "trained" in a corporate setting, chances are you have encountered one or more of these types.  In the corporate world, my experience is that line management doesn't know what good training looks like and probably doesn't care.  Training is something to be endured, not something useful.  This attitude permeates the corporate and industrial world.  Consequently, acceptable resources (not necessarily money, although everything is "money") never sem to be available.  Trainers are not "professional trainers".  It is a side job.  They are not put through train-the-trainer courses and are not given the resources (there is that word again) for continuing training.  Th result of all this is that employees in the US are poorly trained to perform their job functions and generally get by on experience.  A very quick Google search showed me literally hundreds of articles on the importance of training and the payback.  So, why don't business and industry provide the resources?  "Training" is not tangible.  The result is not like that new widget maker that is supposed to put out 1500 widgets and hour and does.  The payback for good training tends to be invisible; the measurements fall somewhere in the realm of black magic and voo-doo.  I can't definitively show that Joe makes more widgets after training than he did before simply because he was trained.  US businesses will not accept the intangible.