In Budapest for the Trainer's Training

As you may have guessed, I am in Budapest! Thank the Lord. In my previous post, I speculated on 6 airports, 6 countries and 2 trainstations... well, I was right!!

The training has begun and so far, it is very fruitful...

Several of our staff from various parts of the world have developed an effective way to train our staff on many subjects from making a word document look good (which I am teaching tomorrow) to network environment issues.

If you will give me a moment, I can give you a bit of the philosophy of the technique and method. The idea of the training is to "increase capacity for buidling movements everywhere by raising IT skills of our staff." In a nutshell, we want people to do more with the tools available to them. In order to do that, we want to do more than just tell them what to do and hope they learn it. We will show it to them and have them practice it during the sessions. That involves taking small chunks of information and keep the sessions small. 10 minute segments per piece of information. My session tomorrow will be 60 minutes, which is broken down into 6 10 minute segments for 5 topics and a question and answer time.

Each segment is broken down to the instructor going through the information in powerpoint, telling why the trainee needs this skill. After that, you get out of powerpoint and show the trainees how to do it. Then turn it over to them to try it out. When they have completed it, allow them to ask questions. When that is done, you move on to the next segment.

The other important feature is to make sure we are having the trainees evaluating the material, instructor and their measurable improvement.

That was our first day. Tomorrow (September 12th) we kick off the day with my training session! Yes, I am the first one that has not used this method to go! The topics are pretty simple to teach, so I should not be nervous. I will keep telling myself that tomorrow when I have to begin!!