Time
and again I would get invites from various trainer groups to become a member
and attend their periodic meetings. There are quite a few in the city. For a
long time I resisted. Mainly because I was still trying to come to terms with
the function, and believed that being a rank amateur, I would actually be a
misfit. But then there were a whole lot of questions that were piling up in my
mind, and so I decided to attend one of them. Primarily, to see if my fellow
professionals could help resolve some of these questions.
There
were about 30 people who had come. The meeting was held in a conference room of
a company whose training head was the president of this group. The meeting
began with every one exchanging visiting cards. An effort at networking, you
might say. Then one of my fellow trainers was invited to give a talk.
“Training
function is a stepchild in most companies”, he began. “We are the least
respected department. Whenever there are financial constraints, our budgets are
the first to get axed. We never get invited to any strategy meetings. We have
no say in the future of the organization…” It went on and on and finally
concluded on a very sombre note, “Training departments in companies have the
most useless people. It is high time that managements gave us the respect and
importance that we deserve. After all we do play an important and useful role.”
Everyone clapped. There was an indignant look on almost everyone’s face. How
dare the management treat us like that! What ignorance! Don’t they realize the
noble work that we are doing? The philistines!!
The
moderator then asked if anyone had anything to add. I should have kept quiet,
had my tea and gone back. They say fools rush where angels fear to tread. I
guess I am the biggest of them all. I
rush where even other fools fear to tread. But then in my entire work life, no
one had called me useless before. And so
I walked up to the head table and to say my piece.
“I
am not a professional trainer. I come from HR background and all my previous
experience has been in that function. Nothing to do with training. I didn’t
volunteer to be transferred to this department. My company asked me to go
there. So by your definition, my company decided that I am pretty useless to
them. But my question is why would a company want to spend money on something
that is useless? Why not just throw me out? No business organization exists for
charity. At the end of the day all companies are looking for profits. You say
management does not respect us. My question is, what have we done to earn that
respect? No company that I know of has ever cut budgets when it comes to
technical training. Maybe that’s because they can see a direct impact of that
training on the bottom line. Maybe they have not been able to see the impact
that behavioural training can make. Maybe we have not really made the effort to
show that impact. Maybe we ourselves are not convinced that it does make an
impact. No company or its management in its sound mind will ignore something
that helps improve profits. So maybe we need to look inwards before we start
blaming organizations and their management for our woes”.
I
walked back to my seat. Needless to say, there was no clapping this time.
Complete silence.,.
Networking
is a great thing. The word must have gone around. I was never invited to any of
these trainer group meetings again…
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