Being a corporate trainer, I have conducted a number of training sessions, programs, and activities in my career. All these make my training portfolio. A training portfolio that focuses your core market, contains defined and updated training objectives and uses diversified training tools both online and offline, assures your success. Your training portfolio is like a vast garden with a lot of new and upcoming flowers, each with different shapes and objectives. In order to make sure you have an accurate portfolio that best matches your field of expertise, target audience and market, you have to keep rebalancing it from time to time. This is my post all about; how to rebalance your training portfolio to the fullest, and how it helps to attain an effective learning experience.
Managing an academic training portfolio is a different endeavor from managing a corporate training portfolio. While businesses today are getting changed faster, so do the technology and requirements for the employees’ skills, expertise, and strengths[1]. This brings a huge challenge for you being a trainer. Your portfolio needs to be rebalanced in a way that keeps replacing the obsolete tools, technology and training material, with the newer and more effective ones. Being a corporate trainer, you need a strong, transformational, quick and frontier portfolio. The titles you carry along with the strategy that you are following, reflect how successful you are in the market.
Achieving a balance
For having a rebalanced portfolio, you have enough focus on your core audience, market, a number of initiatives to penetrate into known territories and a few ones to venture into new and diverse domains. Being a trainer, I have rebalanced my portfolio by tasting almost every business niche; from IT to manufacturing, from marketing to sales. Shifting to fields like this in the industry greatly aids your training portfolio expansion, diversification, and rebalancing[2].
Your portfolio is about them not you
Every business or a corporation has its own business strategies, training goals and requirements for enhancing its employees’ skills. Great companies always tend to align their business and development models with their broader business goals, and that’s something they expect from you being a trainer. Rebalance your portfolio in this way.
While it is easier for the academic trainer to develop courses in accordance with the academic or educational purpose, the corporate trainer is expected to train employees in a way that provides them the tools and understanding which are applicable to employees’ jobs and everyday work. The content, tools, technology, and material must directly benefit the organization that hires you with an expectation to let its employees improve their efficiency[3]. It is, therefore, important for the corporate trainers to engage in a thorough study of the strategy of the businesses they intend to partner with, and to learn about the projects that a particular organization or business is involved in.
It is no longer just one field of work
Those days are gone when trainers had to train employees belonging to just one field or area of expertise at a time, and all of them belonged to the same demographics. Today’s corporate training sessions are much vast and diversified in terms of strategy, technology, and employees’ social and work-related demographics. Now being a corporate trainer, you can expect employees working under the same company, diverse in terms of their origin, language, technical knowledge, qualification, personality traits, and even functional department. As progressing professional training and development providers, your own work must blend management, event management, marketing, content development, production and knowledge in information and communication technology. That’s how you rebalance your training portfolio in today’s corporate world. It is crucial for you to understand the way for building application-driven interdisciplinary training that develops today’s and tomorrow’s workforce, having an enhanced level of skills and functional expertise.
Relationship matters
Your training portfolio needs to be rebalanced in terms of interaction and communication with your clients (organizations) and learners (employees)[4]. Providing quality and learner-oriented training, understanding the contractual, financial and training needs, and keeping in touch with your clients and audience on a timely basis greatly add as a plus point in your training portfolio. It makes the basis of increasing client base while making your portfolio increasingly vast and deeper.
At the same time, building a strong connection with your clients and market, having post-training assessments and learning-oriented discussion, are some of the few essentials for rebalancing your training portfolio[5]. This is because these help you re-evaluating the training objectives and tools you have been pursuing and redefine them at the right time before these become obsolete or make you less competitive in the market.
[1] http://www.marcusevanspt.com/professional-training-course-details.asp?RecID=662#.ViygDvOqqko
[2] https://www.itpreneurs.com/blog/the-ultimate-portfolio-strategy-for-your-it-training-business/
[3] http://evolllution.com/opinions/five-rules-to-succeed-in-the-corporate-market/
[4] http://www.skillpath.com/index.cfm/on-site/seminar/topic/Microsoft-Excel-2010-Basic
[5] http://www.cornwallchamber.com/how-to-excel-at-managing-and-supervising-people-skillpath-corporate-training/
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