I love being a trainer… I truly enjoy working with adults, trying to find new ways to pitch old concepts, new ways to pitch new concepts…

I spend most of my training time on MS Office related products… the full Office suite, including MS Project and Visio… and lately, with a Lotus Notes component thrown in. Its good fun… mostly.

But the most challenging training that I do lately is the ITIL Foundations Certification training…. it is pretty dry material, but oddly satisfying to be able to present, and to see the lights go on behind the eyes of the trainees. I do what I can to inject real world examples, get them to work through at least one case study (time permitting) and try, desperately, to have a bit of fun with it and toss in some applicable jokes. But it is still pretty dry, and an awful lot of material to be presenting in a two day plus timeframe. I always feel like I’m running… moving way too fast.

The one thing that is pretty frustrating is the way that the companies I deal with select the participants. Right now I am training ALL of the Managed Services staff for one IT services corporation. Most of them don’t want to be there, and don’t see the value in the time expended on the training. Hey, they are mostly content to be Help Desk/Service Desk geeks, and have little ambition beyond that.. well that and their out-of-office hobbies and their gamer personas. As such, the material is absolute anethema to them… but their bosses absorb the info amazingly well. The motivation on the part of the managers makes a great deal of sense… but the general geek just can’t be bothered, doesn’t study and eventually becomes one of the ‘statistics’, returning for another session, and another attempt to write the exam. (I’ve actually got one woman who has done the class twice and the exam three times, and still can’t pass!)

Screening… its all about screening. Having a corporation determine that ALL employees must line up with some sort of certification isn’t always necessary… some of these guys need to rethink, re-evaluate and understand the staff that they are pushing through these courses…