What do you look for in your IT trainer?
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-08-10 21:57:57 - Graham EllisWho should you learn from? Should you learn from the most knowledgeable person that you can find on the subject you want to learn?
Not necessarily. The geek that you find may not be a skilled tutor, may not have training material, may assume too much prior knowledge and, importantly, may not know what to leave out. He might not enjoy training, and that may run off onto the trainees and give you a not-enjoyable course. And he may be so much of a specialist that he's unable to help you with associated technologies and he can't tell you when you should use "his" technology and when something else might be more fitting.
It's said that the skill of being a teacher is being ONE step ahead of the class; that's usually said with a wink, but there's some truth to it. Personally, when I'm presenting an advanced or highly tailored course I worry more than I should about it ahead of time, do some research, and aim to be two-to-three steps ahead rather than one. If I've a class of 11 (as I have this week), then I have to be able to answer each question that comes up without delay and know how the answers fit in to the broader picture.
Perhaps I make my own life difficult - but I ENCOURAGE questions. I may say "I'll come back to that" but I'll also add "please keep asking - even if I'm not answering to later, it's helpful for me to know where I should be heading the course / what's your hot points". But the approach does work - it leads to satisfied customers who come back for further training. And where a customer tells me that he's attended some lousy courses in the past where the tutor "has just read the notes out to the class", I know that's a high compliment to me - he's contrasting the Well House Consultants approach to these others.