From Expert to Trainer

Most in-house trainers start as experts. A senior technician is asked to teach new starters how to isolate a pump. An engineer is asked to explain a new control system to operators. A health, safety and environment (HSE) adviser is asked to run the site induction. They know the subject very well. Then they stand in front of a group and find that knowing is not the same as teaching.

A trainer is a person whose job is to make sure that other people can do something after the session that they could not do before. The measure of a trainer is not how much they said. It is what the learners can now do, and whether they do it on the job.

What makes training effective

Training works when four things are true:

• There is a real need. The gap is in knowledge or skill, not in tools, time or procedures. Training cannot fix a broken process.
• Learners practise. People learn to do things by doing them, with guidance, not by listening about them.
• Learners get feedback. They find out what they did right and what to change while there is still time to change it.
• Learning transfers to the job. The supervisor expects and supports the new way of working when the learner returns. Without that support, most new skills fade.

Notice that only one of these four happens mainly inside the training room. A good trainer thinks about the other three as well.

Example: the valve lesson

Rashid, a senior maintenance technician at an invented gas plant called Orvane Processing, was asked to teach four new technicians how to replace a valve packing. He talked for forty minutes and used a detailed drawing. The new starters nodded. The next week, two of them over-tightened the gland follower. Rashid had explained the torque sequence once, quickly, as "the usual cross pattern". Nobody had practised it, and nobody had asked a question. Rashid was a fine technician. He had not yet learned to be a trainer.