Why offering training is great for your own employees

To be frank, there are tons of alternative solutions when it comes to getting trained. You can find online training on Udemy or LinkedIn or vendor sites. We know there is a very wide offering of online courses and training, (MOOC’s); or hands-on training offered by local government sponsored organisations like Voka, Cevora, Syntra and many others.

So what is that other reason – why do we believe in training employees?

At MultiMinds, we really do believe in the hands-on best practices sharing, like craftsmanship you share in face to face sessions. But having years of deep hands-on experience at big companies (retail, telco, pharma) and being able to transfer that knowledge are two different things.

Once you get deep into a matter, and you become like a “subject matter expert”, you find everything easy as pie. You dug into the deep, you know every exception to the standard rules and you now know basically all inside-outs of a small part of the big (technology) landscape. Getting there took a whole lot of digging and shovelling, most of the times you had to do things the hard way if you really want to become an expert.

So once you’ve been there and you’re on the other end of the tunnel: Great. You’re considered an expert! Hurrah!!When that word gets out, you’ll quickly get the questions to help and coach other people: Explain to a junior how to do what you do, or help a new ‘fresh from school’ colleague getting started.

And you have to make sure that person gets at a level so he or she can be at least half as good as you are. But how do you transpose that experience or knowledge? How can you summarize weeks (sometimes years) of learning the hard way in an easy understandable way?

Someone much smarter than me once said “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. That’s one reason why we ask our employees to give training: it forces them to structure their know-how, knowledge and bring a message to people that are interested but not yet that savvy.

>Keeping our own employees on their toes by asking them to explain what they really do, is often a challenge when they have to do that the first time: it takes time to prepare and take steps back. The plain ‘obvious’ has to be structured in a simple logical way with a step-by-step approach so everyone can follow the story and gets acquainted with your very own complex world of analytics, tagging, JavaScript, dashboards, data (and much more).

That’s also a reason why we keep a clear focus on our training, making sure the “knowledge” transfer is also about ‘know-how’ transfer. There’s more than theory, there’s often a need on how to get ‘things done’ in a pragmatic way, making sure you deliver results in your professional life.

Change is a given

Don't get me started on technology, change and evolution. It's there, has always been around and thanks to curiosity we get progress (remember what I said about the Wright brothers).

I'm old enough to remember how to print in WordPerfect 5.1, it required keyboard gymnastics (*) to get there.
That's actually a second reason MultiMinds offers training: To make sure our own people keep up with the pace of change in their day-to-day life and also that they understand it well enough so they can explain it to any public, in an orderly simple way.

Sharing what we know on events like Measurecamp

As all good things come in three-fold, the third reason we offer training is that the result of all our effort create a top class team. We are proud on our team, and we send them to talk on events like Measurecamp!

There is no other use in knowledge and know-how than spreading it, helping moving things forward and always improve and innovate. The more we know, and the easier it is to acquire knowledge somewhere from domain or subject matter specialists, the easier it becomes to innovate and bring incremental improvements.

(*) If you remember how that was done, and you want to talk about training over a coffee, PM me the key combination. I'm happy to buy you an excellent coffee.