New Trainers

I was just recently discussing hiring a new trainer with my Director of Training the other day. We provide safety and craft skills training for the petro-chemical and oil and gas refining industry. Usually, our trainers are extremely experienced craftsmen who are looking for an easier job than one that involves shifts in the plants. 

When discussing our upcoming hiring choices we were presented with a choice between a potential trainer with deep experience and expertise in his field, but no formal training background or capabilities. The second choice was a trainer who had very little expertise but had been a trainer for many years. In all likelihood, his skills in empathy, enthusiasm, clarity, and cultural responsiveness were far more attuned and deeper. The question was to we hire the trainer with little experience or the trainer with long experience but no training experience.

We settled on the trainer with the experience and bet on his having innate capabilities in terms of his empathy, enthusiasm, clarity, and cultural responsiveness or that we might be able to develop those characteristics in him. The calculation was that that would be an easier and more effective road to take than to have a trainer with those characteristics and try to find a way to develop his expertise. An easy decision when you consider that experience in this industry is developed in the field not the classroom. 

What is interesting is that if I read your discussion post correctly, you chose "expertise" as your most important characteristic among the ones that Wlodkowski & Ginsberg identify in our text. We at our safety council came to the same decision about the importance of expertise as you did. 

Will it be hard to develop empathy, enthusiasm, clarity, and cultural responsiveness? To be sure. Those are hard characteristics to develop, particularly with older instructors who have little training experience, but finding ways to develop expertise and experience outside of the refinery field setting would be harder if not impossible.