Case studies- the trainer's story
An open training course provides participants with an away day from their own office and a chance to learn other approaches as well as an opportunity to network. This gives the trainer a whole range of experiences to draw upon and facilitate learning from the interplay of different points of view and approaches.
In-house training can be an equally rewarding experience. It presents quite different and possibly tougher challenges, but it provides you with useful insights that can enrich your work and it stops you getting complacent about your training programmes.
Helping the organisation develop
When in-house training works well, it is a really satisfying thing to do. It offers the trainer the challenge of analysing the specific organisational needs and skills gaps of an NGO and its staff, and tailoring a training approach and materials in response. You can get inside the ‘institutional mind' of an organisation and have a privileged insight into the dynamics and tensions that exist in a group of people who work together.
You might suddenly find yourself orchestrating a surge of creative thinking, or watch heads of department discovering new skills among their team. I recently ran an in-house training course which brought together people from different departments who all worked on different ‘angles' of the same task but rarely came together to discuss and coordinate. I came away with a sense of achievement that I had helped the group to recognise certain blocks and develop mechanisms to move forward with skills, strategies and new insights into how they can work together.
Issues to consider
If you are considering running an in-house training course, do make sure that the training needs both of the organisation as a whole and the individuals who will participate have been explored. There is nothing worse than finding that the participants don't have the same view about the usefulness of your course as the person or department who organised it - in other words don't fall victim to organisational dynamics that should be worked out in another forum.
You want full engagement in your course, so avoid a training situation where you are in competition with the email and the urgent phone call.
