When It Trains, It Pours

As I sit on a rainy Friday afternoon in training, I thought that writing the Daily Blog would truly be impressive, as it would be a lot harder to punch out the funny on those keys when in such a setting. To honor such a courageous occasion, I’ll use my surroundings as the topic du jour.

That’s “topic of the day” for those reading in the States. Ethnocentrists, sheesh.

No matter the company, the topic, the location, or the day, all corporate training classes are completely the same. Here’s a breakdown.

THE FOOD – I have never walked into the doors of a training room and momentarily mistook it for a movie shoot. Two reasons - no one finds a corporate training room as an interesting setting for advancing the plot – not even Office Space went there. And two, the catering spread on a movie shoot is eleventy billion times better than what you find on the back table. Somewhere in LA, an extra who has shown up to play “Uninteresting Guy #4” is scarfing down French pastries and shrimp scampi while those who are driving our economy are picking at thrice-passed over jelly donuts, and lukewarm bottled OJ.

Now, some places may have had better offerings when they set up for the day, but those in my boat never see that food. I have never shown up early for a training session, as I do not plan to sit in training any longer that I have to. To the early go the spoils, but I’m willing to forgo.

THE CLASS – Part of a standard training involves the instructor insisting that we go around the room to identify your position in the company so that they “know the capabilities in reference to the material coming in.” That’s a lie. They just want to know who’s the most important 2 or 3 people in the room, so that they can teach towards their needs and ignore mindless questions from the entry-level staffers. Not a bad idea, except there’s a problem here.

The class knows why it’s happening, too.

So as we go around the room declaring our names and job titles, it becomes less and less truthful as the class is fully announced. Take this class for example. Here’s a sampling of the roll call:

Student #1 = Elisha in Project Control
Student #2 = Ron in Super Secret Project Control
Student #5 = Terry with Corporate Money Making
Student #8 = Julia, Sr. Vice President of Marketing
Student #11 = Roger, United States Attorney General
Student #14 = Bjorn, the king of Sweden
Student #20 = Peter, the reincarnated Apostle

As you can see, it gets out of hand pretty quickly. And one of those folks in the middle leads me to the final training class staple.

THE STUBBORN ROCK – There is always one person who is there completely against his will, and has decided to make the next seven hours a platform for explaining his belief on how stupid the new system (being taught) is and how the only way to do business is the old system that is going away. Here’s a simple analogy.

The company has decided that toasters are no longer the best way to toast bread. It’s not that standard toasters don’t work, they just prefer going forward with the toaster oven, which has more features. Everyone, for the most part is cool with the change – the bread still gets toasted. But the Stubborn Rock tried to demonstrate how the toaster oven can’t toast bread by trying to jam bread in the top of the toaster oven, leaving him with crumbled, smushed, non-toasted bread.

Some people don’t change, and those people always are in your training class.