This isn’t a discussion on the difference between education vs training. No, nothing recent has brought this on; I’ve been thinking about this for some time. I’ve been gathering my thoughts for months and I think I may have a comprehend-able way of putting it all together.
Lats time we went to Utah, I spent a day at the MTC. I sat eating lunch in the MTC cafeteria with a handful of other people from my department. Since I work 99% of the time from home and never put in more than 20 hours a week, I wondered at how my job security was. After all, we’re in hard economic times and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had to cut some people off. To my surprise, his comment was: “No, you definitely have a job here. We don’t have to train you.”
On other occasions I’ve heard about how difficult training can be. It’s a bit deal to most supervisors and managers. Since I’ve been at the trainee end of good and bad training and, and because I’ve also done training myself (hopefully more good than bad), I have some thoughts on what has worked for me and what hasn’t, coming from both view points. I’ve been involved in training with language, farm work, church callings, and very, very technically detailed processes.
There are four steps to good training. It turns out that most of the work is done by the trainer, as it should be, and that’s why most trainers hate training. The trainer has to be mentally ready before training, and that means dropping a lot of preconceived notions:
- I have more experience and know more about it than my trainee
- If you want something done right, do it yourself
- I get to pick and choose what, when, how, and why the trainee has to do something
- I’ll just show the trainee what I do and expect him/her to pick up on what needs to be done
If you do any or all of these things, your trainee probably won’t stick with you very long. You may have the experience and you may have the know-how, but you probably didn’t hire or that person didn’t otherwise come to be trained by you because of sheer stupidity. The person probably has some experience in the field. All you’re really doing is helping that person see how the field specifically fits into the needs of your organization. As for the second one, that may be the case, but you’ll never train anyone with that attitude. If you have children, it takes more time to teach a child how to tie his shoe than it might take others. It’s easier, you may think, if you just do it yourself when they need it. In the long run, that simply doesn’t work. Three above makes it difficult for the trainee to take any reigns, gain any expereince, or learn at all. There needs to be some amount of autonomy in any job for the trainee to fly in her own way and excel. More on that later. As for number four, that notion is really what the following four steps on “how to train” deal with.
1. Help the Trainee Learn to Read Your Mind
If only my trainee could read my mind. If only she could figure out what I’m trying to say and just get with it. The gap of communication is a difficult one to bridge. You have a new person, presumably you’ve only recently met. You have the way you think. The trainee has the way he thinks. You have the way you think the trainee thinks and the trainee has the way he thinks you think. Now you’re trying to communicate with all these different things to take into account. Add on top of that an ambiguous natural language like English, where, if you’re not exactly precise, the communication breaks down all together. You also have different backgrounds and contexts from which both of you understand the things you’re trying to portray. It’s amazing we communicate, let alone train, at all.
Yet somehow we make it through and eventually what we mean when we say something is finally understood. It sometimes takes more time, but that’s not how it should be. Therefore, I give unto you the trick on how to read minds: write it down. Before training ever happens, you should have what you do well documented for several reasons. First, if forces the communication on your part to be clear and precise in stead of stumbling for words the day you decide to train that trainee on something. It also forces you to put together a plan of action for training in stead of just starting with whatever, moving to whatever, and ending on…whatever. When things are carefully put into a certain order and build on each other, much more information is retained by the trainee. Those are two big reasons even if the trainee never sees what you wrote down. Don’t think for a second that you’re job can’t be documented. It can. Don’t make the stupid (and I meant to write stupid) mistake of thinking that you have it all in your head and you don’t need to write it down. That’s just exactly the problem. It’s in your head and no one can read your mind, that is, unless you write it down. Not only does it help you, but it helps the trainee. You can have the trainee read what you wrote and learn all about it before she even starts doing anything else. It also gives her a place to go to for questions, making your job as trainer much, much easier. But at the same time, it allows the trainee to ask better questions. With all of the information they need to do the job before them, they can imagine what needs to be done and ask important questions before they even start- but not silly questions because they’ve read all about it. Finally, writing it down helps the trainee understand that part of “the way he thinks you think” and bridges that difficult gap. This alone makes the last three steps in training that much easier. The best thing is, if you need to train mulitple people on the same job, you only really need to write it down once.
Recap: write it all down. Before the trainee even starts, have him read it.
2. Show the Trainee How it is Done
Now you can walk through the actual task that you’re training on. If you’re training someone how to drive a car, by now you’ve had them read up on it. They know where the pedals are, what they do, how the car fundamentally works, and the laws of the road. Now they may have seen people drive many, many times, but now, with the documentation in that trainee’s mind, you can show them what the documentation meant in action. Now they are really paying attention to how it all works. This is where you get to be a cool trainer, showing the right way to do it, always referring back to what the trainee read. Throw in some quizzes to make sure the trainee understands what’s going on. As trainer, you can get a feel for how well the trainee is ready or not. Don’t blame them if they’re not, though. Most of the time it’s the fault of the trainer.
Recap: Show
3. Let the Trainee Try
Now is probably one of the hardest parts of the training. You, with all of your experience and wisdom, have to force yourself to watch a complete noob try to do what you can do in your sleep. Sometimes it’s hard, other times it’s amusing. Whatever your take on it, this could be the most important step. With background having read about what it is the trainee is now doing, and having seen the master in action, this is the optimal time to let the trainee fly. But, the trick here, is that you’re watching. You don’t say anything. When the trainee looks at you trying to remember what to do next, you hold your tongue and let her remember. This is the point where you get to see if what you wrote and how you displayed the job truly communicated to the trainee. Repeat this step as many times as necessary until the trainee can do it without any trouble.
Recap: Step back and let the trainee try it out
4. Walk Away
Time to let the noob fly solo. You’ve done everything you can do get the knowledge from your head into theirs, even showing the trainee, and even letting the trainee do it while you watched. The trainee should understand it by now and is done asking questions. For some, this is the hardest part. For others, this is the easiest. This is the goal of training, so it’s a step that has to be taken at some point. You have to sign off on it, too. Someone can’t step up and take over a job unless there’s a vaccuum to fill, albeit a planned vaccuum. So you walk away. This doesn’t mean you’re not around if the trainee runs into something or has questions. It may be difficult to balance the inner desire to check up and make comments on the job, but you have to let the trainee practice. A trainee cannot gain experience unless he gains experience. After all, that’s how you gained yours. Sometimes there is a lot at stake, and you will need to make some corrections, but before you do, really take a second to think if it’s really that big of a deal. Most of the time someone has commented on something I was doing, or the way I was doing it, it ended up being pretty much a waste of time. If, however, after all of this, the trianee still doesn’t do it right at all, doesn’t follow hardly any of the trianing you went through, you might want to consider someone else or perhaps a different job for that trainee. That’s up to you the trainer. The trainee may spend some time trying different things, and most of the time that’s fine. But my personal bias is: give them the benefit of the doubt and trust that they will do a good job, even if there is a lot at stake. As a trainee, there’s something about knowing that you are trusted to motivate you to do an even better job. If you know someone is always checking up on you, why bother? Trust is very powerful that way.
Recap: Let the trainee at it without you watching
Two Types of Training
In my experience, there are two types of training. First, there is training to replace. Second, there is training to merge. Training to replace is when you train someone on something and they eventually take it over. Training to merge means that you train the trainee on a number of things that you both take care of. It’s difficult to decide whether it’s best to split up jobs or just have a set number of things that need to be done and everyone just contributes until everything is done. I prefer the former for several reasons. This gets into ‘good management’ rather than good training, but the two go hand in hand. When people have their set jobs, there’s no question as to who ought to do it day by day. There’s less confusion. Even if you train to merge, you will find that set jobs naturally get divvied up. The trouble is that there are jobs that nobody really wants to do, but, seeing a need, someone ends up doing it and it becomes a kind of set job for the person who saw the need. That seems unfair because the only reason that person is doing it is because no one else will. There will always be those kinds of jobs in an organization. Then, one day, everyone decides that someone else is going to do that job and no one does it. Whose fault is it? Everyones and nobody’s fault. On the other hand, there might be a more sought-after job that everyone wants to do, but one person always takes it and doesn’t let anyone else do it. That can be just as harmful because someone might never get to do anything they wanted to do. So, you get together with everyone and find out what people like and what people don’t like. Everyone gets a little bit of each. If you want to rotate jobs, that’s fine too, so everyone knows how to do everything and can fill in, if necessary.
Other Thoughts
I know of a family that home schools their children. They have a child who is nearing teen-age years and can’t read very well. In fact, the child can hardly read at all. It’s sad, and when you ask the parents what their reasoning is as to why they never taught this child, the answer is: “We let our kids decide when they want to learn things. When they are ready, they’ll ask.” Yikes. I see the ‘logic’ here, but there’s a gaping hole in said logic. That is, when something takes effort, a lot of the time, especially with kids, there won’t be any ambition. Sometimes the parent [trainer] has to decide when the child [trainee] is ready for something, and other times the child [trainee] will become interested in something and seek it out, but sometimes even then the parent [trainee] has to know when to say no. For example, a 5-year old probably might have ambitions to drive a car. Well, yeah.
Final Story
I found that following these steps makes training much more effective. I’ve been able to help people understand very, very technically detailed processes with only a small amount of intereference on my part. A lot of the time, when the trainee has a question and I know it’s in the documentation somewhere, I remind them to look there first. Eventually they learn to always look there before asking me. One time when I was training a replacement, I had a spreadsheet of particular jobs that I did and what category they fit under. I had check boxes for each of these steps, but I also had one final box that I checked when I asked the trainee if he was ready to take over the job completely (trianing to replace). Of course, I was still there for questions and back up until I left, but I didn’t ask the trainee if I didn’t think he was ready, and it gave him an opportunity to feel if he was ready for the job. It was a great sight to see my trainee doing the job I trained him to do as he checked documentation and worked through each job by himself. There were even jobs that I just went from step 1 to step 4 and had things work best for everyone. I really did trust him with the jobs and was pleased with the work. Training was quick and effective and we both learned from the experience, and learning was what it was all about.
