The more I start to become more involved in my career path through internships, I begin to realize how vital trainings can be to your overall growth and development. However, you also begin to assess which trainings you may be required to be apart of that will have no relevance to your current role or a role you may hold in the near future. I am going to use some examples from my current career to portray my opinion on the matter as a project engineer for a general contractor construction company.
As stated above, trainings are a huge part of the construction industry. There are so many different aspects of construction that are performed on a day to day basis where someone can get injured, or even have a catastrophic accident. As a Project Engineer, I am not in the field performing these day to day tasks but I am performing more tasks with relevance to operations, contracts, documentation, and owner relationships. These are the trainings that I value because they have great relevance to helping me perform day to day tasks to a higher level and also help these tasks become more simple the more I familiarize myself with the.
For example, a training on how to write up a contract for a subcontractor or a supplier, is crucial to my role on the job and within the company. This is also somethings that is not common knowledge and a training helps me to become more confident when performing these tasks. I constantly measure my effectiveness as we talked about in this week’s lectures, before and after the training to compare my newfound knowledge and my ability to perform the given task. I think measuring effectiveness is huge in being able to retain information and growth in the industry. As mentioned in this weeks lecture slides, development is another key to retaining this information. Without you wanting to put the effort in to develop yourself or having someone such as a supervisor who has job experience in these types of situations to help guide them through the process and being there when I have questions that may have not been accessed in the training module, you will not have the growth you want or expect. This is a training that I would deem relevant.
On the other hand, a training such as rigging, which is the process of moving materials via crane, setting the proper attachment points and knowing the load capacity is irrelevant to my daily tasks. Yes, it is good knowledge to understand what goes through the minds of those performing these activities on a daily basis, however, I would never be in a situation where I would need to successfully perform this task. If I were to perform measuring the overall effectiveness of this training, I would deem the information valuable but not applicable to my role in the project. Thus, I would deem this an irrelevant training for someone in my position. This all leads to how useful trainings can be if they pertain to the right member or person responsible for the tasks being accessed. I think trainings are a great thing to be apart of from an overall growth and knowledge stand point. Nevertheless, I think there needs to be a greater measure of understanding for which members of the company need to attend the trainings. Not all trainings need to be company wide where every member of the organization needs to attend, because then we are beginning to waste both money and time for people of certain roles as they will not retain this knowledge due to never having to perform the task, and the time we are taking out of their day can be better spent on a more applicable training or giving them more time in their day to perform their daily tasks.
I want to know who agrees with this perspective and who believes that all trainings are useful regardless of their role. Please let me know!