If you ask most people who trained them to do their jobs, they will tell you that they were trained by a colleague.

The 2 principal methods that are used to train people are ‘Death by PowerPoint’, where a colleague reads a PowerPoint verbatim to an audience of trainees, or ‘Sitting with Nellie’, where the trainee sits with a co-worker who explains what s/he is doing as s/he does it.

Neither method is particularly satisfactory.

Trainers, who are experts in training methodologies, are normally only brought in to provide soft skills and management training. These courses are the ‘nice to haves’ in the training manager’s toolkit.

So why is the most important training conducted by people who don’t know how to train, while the ‘nice to have’ training is conducted by experts?

The answer is simple, the people who provide ‘on the job training’ are subject matter experts who have an encyclopedic knowledge of the job and the related knowledge required to do it, while the external trainers are subject matter experts when it comes to training.

If organizations want to improve the quality of training in the area where it matters, day to day operations, the solution may be to have the external trainers train the subject matter experts in how to train.

In this way, the quality of training in the office or on the shop floor will improve, new hires will ‘get up to speed’ and be fully profitable quicker and the new hires’ mistakes caused by lack of confidence and knowledge will be reduced.