The last few months of Covid have been eye-opening for parents; especially parents that only have children in the house during the holiday. We sympathize with you, but we also think that it is a great opportunity to rediscover family and guidance. For those who are yet to catch the drift that was a teacher appreciation quick fire introduction. Teachers rock and children are a mess, but that is a good mess.
However, my training has nothing to do with children today. Today is all about Corporate training sessions. Like many other companies around the globe, Reelanalytics has seen a remarkable shift to remote working. Most of my time has now become mostly ad-hoc training sessions for multiple teams and clients at a time. Sometimes an entire day would be about others and not about me and code.
Training people has been an important part of my new remote life. I would like to spend sometime in this post to convince you that it is the most remarkable skill you can take up, if you can run through the following short points.
Teaching is not about you; but it is also about you. I have found that teaching allows you to pass on knowledge to others, and that is very important in this age. I have also learnt that during the process of teaching you also learn from others. You may be an expert at a specific subject matter but what you will learn from others is that there are other ways to look at things that you would never think about. You also figure out that you do not know everything, and this has been a very humbling experience for me.
Teaching also allows you the chance to appreciate diversity and people. You get the chance to meet different people and pick up small and interesting cultural nuances that helps you build empathy for people. The world was not painted in one color. Once you master diversity you learn to share more willingly because you understand that this world does not belong to you only.
The software development world is full of engineers who build a lot of products that fulfill their needs and fail to address the needs of others. Training has shown me first hand that you will sometimes build a feature to be used in a specific way only for a new user to surprise you with a new process. Sometimes this discovery is always so impressing, especially when you discover that your users have come up with a quirky solution to a challenge you didn’t even know you had.
Training also allows you to learn to take feedback; especially when you push a feature that proves to be unpopular with some of your users. Woe unto you if that happens to be majority of your users. It is easy for us to always think we are the brightest bulbs in the room. There are places where Engineers are considered unquestionable rock stars! Sometimes we also build shit products. When you do so prepare to take some tough feedback; if this managed to pass through your QC process.
The value of patience. Sometimes you build features that take people too long to understand. Corporate software can be complicated! That statement is a problem for a thesis. If you build a product that is a bit complex please understand that it will take a few more sessions before your team and client understands how to go about it. If you cannot make it any simpler then you should be able to sit in through numerous sessions showing people how to get about it.
Be grateful. There is no worse feeling than calling a training session to have nobody show up. So if you call people for a training program and people come in droves please take some time to thank them for coming to your meeting/session. Even if just one person shows up. Now that you understand how difficult setting aside time for anything, including training is, you should be able to discern that the people who have come for your training deserve your gratitude. Thank them for the opportunity to teach them and for learning from them too.
Having learnt this I am encouraged to seek every new opportunity to set up training sessions for my teams and our clients. I would encourage you to start as well.