Business Challenge

As strategic business partners for the past forty years, the two companies have supported each other on numerous projects around the globe. So, it was not unusual for one of the business partners to ask the other for support on a project.

What was unusual was the nature of the request. The first company – an organization in the biotech community– needed to have their business partner- a firm in the safety science sector- train their biotech engineers on new ISO standards.

The plan was to then have the newly trained biotech engineers train the rest of their organization so all employees would be in compliance with the new standards.

While The Chief Learning Officer of the safety science company was confident that the engineers knew the content inside and out to train the biotech engineers, he was not confident that they had the skills for Train-the-Trainer Course.

Getting from No Formal Training to Certifying Trainers

When most people decide to study engineering they dream of applying science and mathematics to develop economical solutions to technical problems. In their careers, they are involved in the design, manufacturing, and testing of every product in modern society.

What most engineers do not dream about is standing in front of a classroom and training others on new products or software. The skills that are required to succeed in engineering, do not necessarily match up with the skills required to train others.

The problem: The team of engineers from the biotech firms responsible for training their colleagues had varying degrees of training experience. Some had trained for many years, others were new to training. In order for them to deliver effective training, they first had to learn the content and then learn the most effective way to deliver it.

TrainSmart has worked with the safety science firm for over a decade. The Chief Learning Officer asked TrainSmart to partner with them to develop a Train-The-Trainer that blended the expertise of their engineers with TrainSmart’s expertise in training.

The Challenge: TrainSmart’s traditional Train-The-Trainer is a three-day course. However, the safety science company needed three days to deliver the content. That meant TrainSmart had to condense its Train-the-Trainer to two days.

TrainSMART Solution

TrainSmart offers the only certified Instructor-led Train-the-Trainer program in the United States. It is a very full three-day course. To accommodate the shortened timeframe, TrainSmart decided to cut modules on instructional design and virtual learning modules.

Instead, the engineers went through rigorous training on principles of adult learning, communication, and learning preferences. In addition, the learners did all the practice activities that participants in the three-day program are required to do. The key was to make sure the learners felt comfortable with training others and to have an appreciation of how to deliver training most effectively.

Results

The client measured results in a variety of ways. They observed the engagement of the learners and they reviewed the course evaluations. Based on those findings, the client said this is a model that worked and they will use it again. Most important, everyone saw significant improvements on the part of the learners and the biotech company was able to roll out successful training worldwide.