Remember, and never lose sight of the fact that YOU were chosen to become a trainer because your employer thought you had what it takes to teach and develop other people. What a compliment! You should be very proud of yourself.

Putting that aside lets get started on some things that will prove your boss made a good decision. When training new people, like I hit on last night REMEMBER what it was like when you first started. It was scary. A lot of new things to learn. One of the most important things is to be patient. Everyone cannot learn as fast as you perhaps. Don’t compare what you accomplished with your new trainee.

Each person is a unique individual, hence the training has to have a unique twist to it to accommodate the strengths and weaknesses of each individual.

“The Specialist” looks for things during the training session, regardless of how small, to catch the trainee doing something RIGHT! When I find even the smallest thing you would think that the trainee just won the lottery the way I lavish the praise and excitement. Believe me the trainee will do enough wrong to the point that they will be down on themselves unless YOU come to the rescue. I call those little things I catch them doing right “building blocks”. The student will be so happy they pleased you that they will be much more receptive to the constructive criticism, to the point that they will go over the things they did wrong continuously to fix them.

The speed of training will increase 10 fold using this technique. I think the most important thing is to make the training FUN! Have a good time with the trainee. They are not in the Marines. Lighten up and have some fun. You will find that by lacing the training with fun you will actually take the trainees mind off the hard work at hand and they will actually reach the desired results without the stress most companies put on them.

A moment ago I mentioned that each person is unique. Find out what is unique about your trainees. For some it may be their “million dollar” smile, for someone else it may be the quality of their voice, still someone else may have unusually incredible work ethics. Point this out! With this technique the trainee will realize you have spotted what they like most about them self, making them realize that you will utilize THEIR strengths to reach the goal. Boy, doing these things makes training a lot more fun and take the word of “The Specialist” a lot more effective! I will follow up with more tips on training for sales and management in future posts.

“The Specialist”