Hack:
Education, Education, Education - The Rise of the Training Ambassador

By Creighton Urgo - Network Engineer at Yaana Technologies, LLC.

November 17, 2011 at 4:52am

Summary

I have noticed a shift from companies sending many employees to a single training course to companies sending many employees to separate training courses. I expect that this is due to the rapid knowledge increase of my industry. In several cases, I have noticed this shift has occurred with few changes to the training process resulting in limited gains from these investments. This is what leads me to believe a clear training process can be the foundation for a team ’s exposure to new knowledge, and that knowledge paired with the goals of that team leads to innovation.

Problem

When you invest in a single team member's education you are motivating that team member by showing them that they are currently valuable to the team, and that you have an interest in that team member's future success within your organization. What happens if you can't send the entire team to training? What message are you sending to the other team members? How do you keep your team up-to-date with the latest training without compromising days or weeks of several members’ time? How do you identify your team's future training needs?

Solution

The Training Ambassador is a mechanism to give your team the ability to dramatically increase its knowledge exposure without wastefully decreasing its available resources and hold those sent to training accountable for obtaining the target knowledge.

First Steps

Step One: Transparently and democratically propose and determine what external training programs would be helpful to your team.

Your team should continually update a working prioritized list of all external training that can help your team be more successful. The highest priority entry should be a training course that is deemed the best resource to find that most critical missing knowledge.

Periodically hold quick elections where people can view the past results of surveys to choose their Training Ambassador for each desired training course. This is further described in: “Step Six: Review the Ambassador”.

Step Two: Arm your Ambassador with a list of Knowledge Points prior to the training course.

These Knowledge Points are based on what made this training a priority item. Make it the Ambassador’s responsibility of finding relevant information for each of these knowledge points and report the results back to the team.

Step Three: When the Ambassador is attending the training course, the Ambassador should seek all relevant knowledge for the team.

This includes seeking out the answers to the Knowledge Points, contacts that can add be accessed as resources for future questions that might come about in the future, and gaining new insights to the training course area of focus.

Step Four: The Ambassador is to adapt the training course knowledge to the function of your team and document all relevant data.

This is where the filtering of relevant knowledge occurs giving the rest of the team the benefit of not having to waste resources doing the same filtering again and again.

Step Five: When the Ambassador returns from the training, have a "Brown Bag" training session, where the Ambassador can review newly discovered data and share it with the group.

This is where the results of the Knowledge Points are shared with your team, identify if some members of the team need to set up a more in-depth meeting and take those additional details offline.

Step Six: Review the Ambassador.

Send out a quick survey that can judge the effectiveness of your Ambassador and the validity of the training material to each member of the team, use this data for future Ambassador and Training course elections.

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November 17, 2011 at 1:18pm

denis krizanovic

I like this. It's simple and will probably be effective. Giving it a title, "Training Ambassador" gives the "present back what you learnt" idea more oomph.