Does online training works? It does for me. (1/2)

I have never been a big fan of online training, or face-to-face for that matter. Honestly, listening to someone sharing information with a set of slides has always been a drag. It depends a lot on the person giving the training: is his tone of voice dull? I’ll fall asleep after 5 minutes!

How many ways can there be to make a training session uninteresting and a totally waste of time? If I have a pen and paper, I start to draw my best Picasso. Probably, I’ll just begin to insanely search for absurd topics on my cell phone, or start conversations with friends about extremely important matters, like “a girl likes my Instagram photo, does she want me?!”

In my opinion, there are countless ways of passing on knowledge, at least from a trainee’s perspective. Yet, the traditional way still prevails, and it doesn’t work that well for me, proving itself ineffective and causing me some frustration.

The typical (boring) teaching approach.

I understand that having the help of a script and digress around the subject is the safest approach for who’s presenting. But the probability of the audience making random questions rather than those that actually matter, just gives the trainer the perfect escape exit in case he gets lost.

There is also the case where the trainer himself experiences some difficulties, especially when there are more experienced and eager to learn students that will keep interrupting to ask questions. From my point of view that can be a problem because the trainer is then focused on their doubts, and the entire class becomes bored and feeling insecure by not being as much into the subject.

Unfortunately, both these teaching approaches are very close to what I have most been in touch with.

Can online training be something totally different (maybe exciting)?

Nowadays, IT companies are investing even more on their training programs. Teams must be competitive but also work constantly on their skills to keep up. To do that, Polarising designed a training program that each consultant can tailor to their technical and soft skills needs, but above all, that challenges and excites us.

Polarising’s training program is built considering some of the best partners in the education market, like K21. In short, and trust me: they aren’t pay me to advertise, K21 is a Brazilian worldwide company that advocates business evolution through training, coaching and mentoring, with a very similar positioning to Polarising: Agile.

We are about to enter the Kanban zone.

I decided to check on what courses K21 has under the module “Agile on the Road Europe“. I was eager to go back to learning something new and two of their courses caught my attention, both were exactly what I was looking for.

The first course I took was Kanban System Design. It is an intensive 2-day course consisting of 2 online sessions (via Zoom) of 8 hours each. Ok… 8 hours in 2 sessions doesn’t sound too encouraging, does it? The schedule was not that attractive either, as the time difference from Brazil is 4 hours less than Portugal and my lunch break would be at 5pm!

I was even more demotivated after talking to some of my colleagues who had attended the course in the past and weren’t impressed, in fact the feedback was somewhat negative.

But as the good adventurer I am (not really), I decided to go on this scary journey and ordered 50 capsules of coffee and prayed for the best.

(to be continued)

• 

Rui Maciel
Polarising Business Analyst

Support Links:
https://k21.global/
https://agileontheroad.eu/#hero
https://kanban.university/

Know more about Polarising’s teams and check our job opportunities.

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