The Art of Imparting Training

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

- Aristotle

Everybody cannot become Trainer. You can become a lecturer to educate students but in training you need to have expertise in life skills. The question is how to become a good trainer? The following tips may help you become a good trainer.

1. The training programme must be related to the problems and needs of the trainees. It should simply skills that are useful for the trainees' work and life.

2. The emphasis today, particularly, must be on trainee participation. Pumping information was never more irrelevant than now.

3. Training without precise performance objectives is entertainment at best.

4. Skills in dealing with people are best learnt in group situations.

5. The organization to which the trainee belongs must be such as to allow them to practice the skills they acquire. If the training learned in the programme is counteracted by the attitudes and behavior of their boss, colleagues, subordinates or the whole climate of the organization, then it is best that the training should not be undertaken.

6. In some engineering colleges when a trainee has solved a problem, the instructor asks the trainee to do the problem in another way. When that is done, they are asked to do it in another way, and then another, and so on. This searching for other ways of solving problems leads to finding better solutions.

7. The learning style of trainer is usually more reflective, abstract, and conceptual, while the practitioner's way of learning is more active, concrete and experimental. This tension can be fruitful.

8. Attitudinal and behavioural change must be based on an experience: an experience reflected upon, conceptualized and experimented with.

9. The behavior and attitudes of the instructor are the most crucial factors in any training programme.

10. Attitudes will not change unless the emotions and feelings of the trainees are engaged. Attitudes cannot be changed without the involvement of the 'stomach'.

Finally, a trainer must be active and training must be activity oriented and should avoid lecture mode. A lecturer is not a trainer and a trainer should never fall into lecture mode. Training must be full of activities and it must be interactive with thought provoking games and role plays.