Effective Knowledge Transfer ‘Fortifies’ Your Organization

Any organization, in the course of its growth, develops a repository of knowledge that is critical to sustenance and further growth. This repository evolves with the industry evolution too. Especially in knowledge-driven organisations, knowledge and know-how remains with a few resource persons in the organisation. It is expected that they coach, transfer or share this knowledge with their colleagues. Unfortunately, sometimes, employees with great technical and functional knowledge create large slide-decks and documents, but are not successful in achieving ‘retention of knowledge’. There are several reasons for missing out on retention of knowledge, one of the most important ones being the low attention paid to the facilitation skills of the technical trainer, and the vehicles of learning used.

As a young and inexperienced group that is used to having information at their fingertips, rapidly becomes a part of the workforce, the challenge becomes greater. The open-ness and approachability of the technical trainer is essential to ensure that experience and wisdom gets transferred. To get an audience engaged on application of learning, technical trainers need to adapt a participant-driven training design process. In addition to the basics of communication and presentation skills, the ability to measure the effectiveness of one’s own delivery and the keen-ness to connect with participants even after the program, go a long way towards building the culture of knowledge sharing in the organization.

Having worked with several technical trainers, here are 3 attributes that we feel, make a technical trainer a shining star!

Owning the content: We often see trainers using slides prepared by someone else. Solid and updated content that is owned by the trainer, builds respect and credibility in the sessions..

Commitment to Creativity: Use of analogies, pictures, stories and  We all love to listen to stories, and experience and wisdom is best shared through them. Technical training and story-telling seems disconnected at first sight, but this has been seen as one of the best ways to improve retention. Selection and preparation of customized demos, exhibits, that are not copy-pasted but developed especially for the session, build the same commitment with the participants

Commitment to business benefits: Technical trainers must acknowledge that each adult has a different learning style, and hence tune the vehicles of knowledge transfer accordingly. Some pieces of knowledge may require hand-holding after the program, as well as creating the right tools at the workplace in order to implement it. People who share technical or functional knowledge are usually very much part of the organization, and their ability to inspire and influence the other stakeholders, and hand-hold the participants through the application of the newly found knowledge, actually creates the business benefits for the organization.

While most technical trainers are aware of their gaps, sometimes they don’t know where to start or do not have a suitable platform to practice these skills. They spend a lot of energy in upgrading their own technical skills but give low priority to working on their own facilitation skills. Creating a community of technical trainers within the organization can be inspiring for them. It also helps to provide an opportunity to observe each other and learn newer techniques.

The 4Tfy program

For organizations with technical/functional knowledge sharing as an imperative, Element78 offers the 4Tfy program for technical and functional experts to enhance their platform skills. Train the Trainer has 3 T’s,  but Training the Technical Trainer has 4 T’s. A good technical trainer fortifies the organization by building technical muscle, and hence the name of the program – 4Tfy.  The unique features of this program are:

• Individual attention and coaching from seasoned facilitators
• Being part of a trusted learning group with multiple opportunities to practice in small nuggets
• A structured and well-practiced technical content, with feedback incorporated from the peer-learners group
• Post-program hand-holding

Get in touch with us by writing to us at learning@element78.in and know more about the upcoming 4Tfy program.