You don’t have to be a trainer
If you are IT specialist, probably one way or the other you are a lifetime learner too. Being a part of our community makes me eligible to state, it is probably one of the most demanding aspects of our work life. There is a part of our community known as dark matter developers. But even this group has to get trained from time to time, either learn specification of a new version of their favourite language or learn about new compliance requirements.
What are the sources that we are learning from? Who is authoring the content? Who it teaching us?
Content quality
You’re probably learning on a daily basis, by simply googling the problem you have. You might learn from your colleagues or learn from documentation, tutorials, books, podcasts, webinars, other kinds of videos, or on-site (virtual) face to face courses. Most likely there is a couple of other ways that I did not mention. Having such diversity in learning options is an embarrassment of riches. It’s not a surprise that for most of the problems there is more than one solution. However what if there are wrong solutions? Not optimal ones? Overcomplicated?
Misinformation and content quality is the problem of the information age. Technology is not immune to it. Misinformation is a problem on its own, so complex that I will not even try to reason about it. However, content quality resonates a lot with my profession and my personal interests. I’m an AWS solutions architect at NearForm and a part-time trainer at Cloudaemons. I’ve run dozens of courses, wrote a couple of blog posts, and even recorded some webinar recently. The context of this post makes it a bit ironical, but trust me — I know what I’m talking about :) On average, training attendees rank us very high.
A good teacher
Let’s presume you’ve been given a great slide deck and/or scenario-based practice sessions or anything other that has best in class quality. How easy that would be to conduct training based on those materials? Do you think that everyone with a bit of preparation and domain knowledge could be a successful teacher?
In the technology space, the challenge with getting the right person in the right place in a teaching role is an even greater problem, than in other spaces. Personally, I think being a techie quite often is not going in pair with great interpersonal skills.
Why you could want to become a trainer
I can’t talk for others, so let me explain what led me into the training business.
Business perspective
This is a big one. If you have a bit of entrepreneur spirit you probably wonder from time to time how to start your own business. I have such reflection quite regularly. This is a good thing for me, it motivates me. But having a business does not mean it has to be a full-time job. Although, most people probably will consider scaling up the business once it kicks-off, it might be worth having a second thought and check if you want to be a businessman or a trainer. In Poland, there was a famous case (almost 2 years ago) when a single training program earned 500.000€ in 8 days. There were many factors to that success, but probably the most important one was that it was marketed and sold not by the training authors, but specialized and experience 3rd party. I can tell you, it was a trigger for hundreds of attempts like that, yet none of those was even close to that success. I wonder if there’s a relationship with the top-notch trainers that authored that training and skills/experience of trainers in the other programs.
Career expectations
With a couple of years of experience, there are expectations to progress with the career. To grow. The logical step to grow for a technical expert is to share your knowledge, or is it? Quite often, skill matrices in big enterprises have one part in common — a requirement for mentorship and/or being a trainer. This is one of the concepts which I personally dislike and to be honest, I would recommend to remove. It is hard for me to count the number of training sessions I’ve taken part in as an attendee, that was a waste of time. The underlying problem is not with people conducting those courses! Believe me, nobody wants to be bad about what is he or she doing. Quite often trainers have been nominated to that role only because of how good they are in a particular technology. This is the problem. Teaching skill is a skill on its own. Very unique and very hard to master. One can say, you have to practice to get better at it. I’d say there is a personality trait, that can be recognized before even starting. Are good line management and mentorship the answer here?
Personal brand
Once you reach some point in your career it is hard to get promoted. Once you will reach the senior principle position, you can’t go much further unless you’re interested in less technical roles that involve management. As a senior principle in your organization most likely you’ve been recognized as an expert there. What further goals can you set? Of course, become a trainer. How cool is that to put a trainer role into your CV? Even cooler is to share with that your LinkedIn community. I think some people feel more comfortable creating an online training available on youtube than contributing to open source. What do you think, what could give you more points to your personal brand, being an open-source contributor or a trainer?
Easy product
The fact that it is relatively easy to reach your audience on a global scale, creates a temptation to give it a try and publish your own training on how to build your first serverless backend or how to improve your node.js based application throughput. Really, a simple webcam, microphone, and youtube access are “all you need”, to become a public figure. From that point, you’re just one step before publishing your paid training and earn a small fortune!
I wonder if there is a topic that is not yet covered by random internet guys on youtube. Now, how often that training meet your requirements?
Trainer personality traits
Being a trainer is extremely satisfying. Nowadays being a good trainer can be very rewarding. Aside from gratitude from your attendees, good compensation, being a trainer is one of the methods I personally use, to deepen my knowledge. There is no better way to understand technology than trying to explain it. There are different methodologies that can be applied for teaching, some are more suitable for technical training, some are better for young students others can suits well for the online type of learning. No matter which option the trainer selects, there is a couple of personality traits/qualities that will help to be a good trainer.
Extraversion
If I would have to name one trait, it is being extrovert. It groups well many aspects of personality and in the general way of being. Of course, being an introvert is not a blocker — however, it might more challenging for such a person.
Confidence
It makes a trainer’s life so much easier if your students can trust you. Being confident can sometimes help you to deal with the type of students that nobody likes. In fact, sometimes it can help to hide your stress or even hide your uncertainty in various situations.
Humbleness
Something you’ve learned 20 years ago, does not mean it is easy. I’ve met many times this kind of bias when a different type of teachers and trainers assumed something should be obvious. Unfortunately, in those situations, they often forget the effort they had to spent to learn how to solve a given problem. Once you will acknowledge that the fact you can be a teacher now, is not only because of your efforts but the good teachers you had a chance to meet before. Remind yourself of the best teacher you had, and now make all you can, to be remembered the same way by the others.
This list makes my top 3 of the good trainer qualities. However, no matter how good speaker you are, how entertaining you can be, without deep expertise and understanding of the space you want to teach in, it might be not enough.
Side effects
To all I wrote before, in fact — we are all in a great situation. With enough time, you can learn stuff about quantum physics as well as learn how to train your dog. The side effect to this richness is a time lost on reading or listening to the content that has overall poor quality. Frustration coming from this situation quite often is undermining the credibility of others and makes it harder to be noticed by the community for the challengers in the training space.
It is perfectly fine to try. Frankly speaking without trying you will never know if you will be a good trainer or not. Just be conscious of your decisions and select your career path accordingly to your skills and opinions.
Now tell me, are you already a trainer or planning to become one? If so, why?
Disclaimer
This post is not supposed to discourage anyone from anything. All the observations noted in the post are my own.
