Lower costs, simpler language, a personal rapport between people who already work together, closeness between instructor and trainees… These are some of the reasons why large companies are getting used to having their own employees act as trainers, teachers and mentors for their coworkers whenever there are advances in production, new applications or new rules in place.
The formula is simple: a coworker who has mastered a production task and handles it with enough professional skill is put in charge of training, teaching and answering the questions of the other employees who have to do similar work.
How and why to use the train-the-trainer approach
It’s the responsibility of companies with a large number of workers, either at a single site or across several locations, that have repetitive processes or are adding new production lines to their organization. It can also be used to train staff on rules and on basic, simple tasks.
Imagine we run a supermarket chain with a presence in several cities and an indefinite number of stores in each one. Across the whole chain we’re going to introduce new rules on how to lay out the products and how to distribute the workload, because we’ve realized that customers can’t find our cheapest products, and there are customer complaints that at certain times of day the supermarket doesn’t have enough staff on the checkouts.
Head office has taken the measures it sees fit for both problems and has passed them on to its area managers (one trainer has trained several trainees in those techniques), who will be responsible for rolling them out in the stores within their area. (Those trainees will in turn become trainers for their own coworkers at their usual workplace.)
This kind of training is not common when it comes to technical, specific training aimed at particular people because of the type of work they do or the specifics of their job profile. Take, for example, an HR manager who needs to learn the details of a labor regulation that affects only their own particular duties.
The profile of the peer trainer
People don’t pay the same kind of attention to a qualified trainer with a brilliant résumé as they do to a coworker who speaks in a friendly, colloquial way and uses the group’s own jargon. That’s why, for this specific kind of training, it makes sense for a coworker to deliver it.
The coworker faces the same problems as everyone else, does the same job and knows first-hand the consequences and quirks of their own group and workplace. They should be someone who is good at getting ideas across, approachable and respected by their coworkers, articulate and knowledgeable about the subject.
The trainees will identify with their coworker and will share their concerns and their own work problems with their tools, and the trainer, drawing on their own experience, will understand and resolve their situations as best they can. Anything they need to look into or rethink because they’ve never come across it, they’ll leave for another time and promise to come back with a solution later.
Featured image: Apple and Pear Australia Ltd, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
