Training

Tutorials are not enough: we still need teachers (also in the company)

The key elements for effective knowledge transfer and employee learning

11 December 2024

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To compete in increasingly complex, volatile and uncertain markets, companies must accelerate the transmission of knowledge and continuously teach their employees to do something new. This means that companies need 'employee-trainers', people who are able to make their know-how available to their colleagues. It is no coincidence that the so-called Corporate Academies have exploded in the last ten years.

There is often a lack of awareness of what a good trainer is. People think that video courses, tutorials, pills and tons of slides are enough to transmit knowledge, according to a mentality that winks at the concept of self-teaching (I give you the contents, you watch them and learn by yourself). This approach is undoubtedly efficient, but not fully effective because people still need masters to learn how to do something new. Masters in the old sense of the word. It is one thing to learn to play chess by yourself, it is another to 'grow' in the game with the support of a master.

The question at this point becomes: what is a teacher? Answering this question means outlining at least four missions that any instructor/trainer/trainer must embody in order to give meaning to their work and to make any knowledge transmission process effective.

1) Conveying passion

The great Plutarch is credited with a wonderful phrase: students are not vessels to be filled but torches to be lit.

If I talk about work safety or if I tell a procedure, the bulk of my role is not to convey content that can easily be told in a manual alone, but to motivate, to frame what I am teaching in a broader framework, so as to attract the curiosity and interest of the listener. To a labourer I can say 'I'll teach you how to use the jackhammer' or 'I'll teach you how to use the tool with which you will help build the hospital in your village'. With this in mind, it is important that trainers/instructors/trainers always keep in mind the banal but fundamental assumption that you can only give passion to others if you have it.

2) Explain well "the name of the game", i.e. the rules of the game

The teacher is the one who gives you a correct key to what you have to learn. Let us assume, for example, that we are the trainer of a bus driver. When explaining how to drive, we can offer different keys of interpretation: 'Your job will consist of ensuring comfort for all passengers, especially those who travel standing up', or 'Your job will consist of driving without getting too tired so that you are always lucid', or 'Your job will consist of taking into account what happens in the bus while driving'. These are three equally valid but certainly very different interpretations. Using one rather than another, however, will condition the content and method of teaching, as well as the results of the training process. As absurd as it may sound, teachers often fail to frame their discipline with the correct reading key and in this way undermine the effective transmission of knowledge.

3) Identify and maniacally cultivate the fundamentals

The master is the one who knows precisely and extremely punctually those few 'critical gestures', 'critical events', 'critical actions' that make the difference because they are the basis of the entire operation of the discipline in question. The good master cultivates the fundamentals obsessively. To explain myself with a musical example, the good drum teacher is the one who devotes himself obsessively to an apparent detail such as the grip of the drumstick because he knows that you will not be able to hold certain rhythms as a drummer without a perfect grip.

4) Giving timely feedback

The teacher is the one who is capable of observing the execution of an activity, of punctually identifying merits, flaws and concrete instructions, giving them back to the pupil in a few words, in a concise simple and non-judgmental manner.

As is evident, these four components of the good teacher/trainer/instructor are interlinked. Passion drives and the other elements necessarily follow.

* Managing director of the training and consulting company Sparring.