F2CONSULTING®

I have been involved in training for more than 15 years now.

I find it a wonderful personal and professional experience. My responsibility is to teach people how to use quite complicated and elaborated programmes (CAT translation programmes), which require different approaches according to the different types of people using them. This is actually an activity that I have been engaged in for much longer, when explaining procedures and methods to people collaborating with me on specific projects.

The most challenging aspects in a training situation are establishing a shared language and creating a shared emotional context.

A shared language is indispensable for you to speak clearly to the learning user: you need to immediately sound out their technical vocabulary and then adapt your own to theirs, so that they can understand you and dialogue with you without feeling alienated or intimidated. Creating a shared emotional context is like establishing a psychologically comfortable relational space where you both feel able to engage positively with each other, where your greater technical experience in the training subject is experienced as just part of a wider personal helpfulness accepted by the learner as a growth opportunity.

The most frequently used technical tools in technical training processes are:
1 – Workshops
2 – Webinars
3 – Document access on shared platforms
4 – Blogging FAQs and Wishlists
5 – Sharing and analysis of Best Practice methods

Gathering and cataloguing impressions, at the end of a training session, is important as a way of keeping track of the presence of eventual discrepancies between goals and achievements.

The analysis of single and collective evaluations encourages the deployment of new or different approaches and tools that will be more successful in aligning the training process with the individual user’s needs. It also helps identify and overcome personal factors which may be inhibiting the success of the teaching/learning dialogue.

The training process should also be an enrichening experience for the person doing the teaching, because through the dialogue and sharing process with different people’s different experiences and awarenesses they should open themselves to the stimulus of new knowledge and perspectives: professional development always goes hand-in-hand with personal growth.