The first professional training course I gave involved a 275 mile late evening drive in a 1 litre European econobox from Letchworth in the UK to a dingy hotel in Alnwick.  I was pretty nervous –some of my delegates were engineers who had been using Mathcad for over ten years, and I was being paid to tell them what they didn’t know.  The following day, after drinking several litres of coffee, I drove another five miles to the training location, only to find that just one delegate had turned up.  Luckily he was just an intern who’d never used Mathcad before – and to him I was an expert.

That was in November 2001, and since then I’ve gradually refined my training style.  I generally train small groups of engineers, so I can afford to be interactive, and I try to inject a modicum of humour into the courses as well.  (Since I rarely train the same group more than once, I have the freedom to reuse jokes.  Some I’ve been telling for years, and have reached an inhuman state of perfection in their timing and delivery).

I’ve also seen other trainers present their material, and have been the willing student at several courses as well.  With complex math and simulation tools, trainers tend to make several mistakes (and so did I early in my career).  These include:

• Overloading your delegates with information.  There’s a limit to how much information a person can assimilate in an hour.  Less is often more, but some trainers think they’re providing value by cramming as much technical information into a morning as possible. I try to release information at a rate that maximizes retention but still keeps the course going at a reasonable click.
• Basing the training course around slides.  You learn how to use complex math and simulation tools by using them, not by reading bullet points on a slide. Passive recipients of information generally do not retain information. 
• Talking at your delegates, not to them.  If you’re not interacting with your delegates, then they may as well be watching a video.  Interactivity is important to me, and I try to ask questions to help them recall information and make connections between related concepts, but I don’t make this obvious or intrusive. This demands more of the trainer, but is ultimately more rewarding for everyone. (On a peripheral note, one great example of a teacher-student interaction is in Meno, a Socratic dialogue written by Plato; Socrates draws the laws of geometry from an uneducated slave through a series of questions)
• Not knowing your tool or your target audience.  This knowledge takes time and experience to develop.  I’ve found that the most effective technical trainers have spent several years on first and second line technical support, interacting with existing and potential customers and learning about their applications.

I tend to get back a lot from training courses as well.  You always learn something new, whether it’s about the software or an application area that you’d never encountered.  (The latter I can also exploit in my role as a technical marketer).

The most satisfying part of giving technical training courses is when you hear “Oh wow! I’m geeking out over this!” This is usually the epiphany of giving training courses for me – the point at which you know you’ve met someone who’s as fascinated by the technology itself as you are.

I had several of these moments when I and one of my colleagues, Dr Gilbert Lai, gave a Maple and MapleSim training course to a group of engineers in Florida.  As soon as one delegate saw how easy it was to model pendulums and multi degree-of-freedom robots, he said “I’m sold. You got me.”  He had been deriving dynamic equations for electro-mechanical and multibody systems by hand and translating them to Simulink® – a time-consuming task.  MapleSim, to him, meant that he could better deploy that time elsewhere, and raise his personal productivity.

Ultimately, a trainer has to enjoy engaging with people.  You may be training a senior engineering manager or a new hire, but simply by being human they are social animals and want to engage with others. And as I remarked earlier, your favourite jokes and stories always find a new and willing audience each and every time.

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