What about the Trainers?

Got you interested with that header didn’t I? Well, what about trainers – what separates the excellent trainers from their “page-turning” colleagues? You guessed it – a deep understanding of the product, real-world experience and the ability to convey their knowledge in a way that their students can follow.

This all sounds so simple – the person at the podium should know the product very well. Note I didn’t say should be an uber-guru – but that they know the product very well. Are there some trainers who are accepted as one of the premier Subject Matter Experts in a particular product-yes. But does that mean if you are not one of these illustrious SMEs you can’t teach that product – no. A good trainer will know the product they are going to teach very well. They will have gone through all the labs, found potential trouble areas and gone beyond the curriculum. Now there is a novel thought – going beyond what the syllabus calls for in the classroom. An excellent trainer can do this.

There are some absolutely brilliant individuals who are the consummate experts in a product, but who should never be allowed to teach a class – they simply cannot convey the material so the students can understand what is being said to them. It quickly becomes the scenes from a Charlie Brown cartoon where the teacher is talking all the students hear is noise, not words. A trainer has to be able to talk to his audience, not over, not under, but presents the material at a level the student can understand and follow.

The last key area of a good instructor is having real-world experience, hands-on experience with a product. They have installed a server in a production environment, tested it to ensure it is functioning properly. Even better, they have been called in to troubleshoot a problem where you don’t have the option of wiping a “troublesome” system as you could in a classroom environment. Troubleshooting is as much an art as a science. Yes, there are basic procedures you should follow, but beyond that it is going through a series of steps to address the issue. By getting this hands-on experience, you, as the consultant, gain invaluable experience that you, as the trainer can bring to the classroom. I am sure most of you have experienced a “page-turner” before. These are the instructors who have zero (zip, zilch, nada) hands-on experience. I have encountered trainers before who have almost no or, at best, very little experience, or the last time they touched a production system was 10-15 years ago. This is still better than the ones with no experience, as they at least some concept of a production environment. The ones that worry me are the “trainers” who come straight into the classroom with no experience (say straight from college) and try to give advice to IT pros on how to work with and manage their production networks.

Ok – enough time on the soapbox for now. Experience counts and counts heavily. As a trainer, you must have this experience to bring relevancy to the classroom and establish your credibility as a trainer.