Week 6 – Work Trainings

Every single company needs to train their employees to do their job. Well, there can be a big difference between a good and bad training. From my experience, a good training is one that is hands on and keeps the persons attention.

A good training that I have gone through is when I first started at my career as an estimator at CBC. I was given all the tools to do my job, and they told me to takeoff a set of plans. Considering that I have never seen a set of plans before, this seemed like an impossible task. However, struggling is essential to learning. This way, the person is forced to critically think and solve problems. Some may not consider this much training, but after I struggled for a while, I received some helps to walkthrough the set of plans and explain some essentials. According to this week’s lecture, effective training should impact behavior and results, not just learning. This is exactly what happened as I was thrown into the fire at first and then received feedback on what I can do better. With that being said, my supervisor encouraged my development and wanted me to succeed which led me to want to perform better.

Like I said earlier, there is a big difference between a good and bad training. Well, a bad training that I have gone through in the past was one that I was grouped into a big class and was taught in a lecture style training. As discussed in this week’s material, trainings are best when they are building skills and knowledge, not when they are trying to pass on information through monotone dialogue. This training was not effective as I did not get to do anything hands on or learn a skill through action.

Effective training strives on engagement, feedback, and meaningful teachings. Doing otherwise is more of a waste of time and resources.

Citations:

Buckingham, M., & Coffman, C. (2014). First, Break All the Rules.
W6 Lecture 1 – Training
W6 Lecture 2 – Evaluating Training Effectiveness