How should I respond to training requests?

Being a freshie in IPAM has its advantages. It means I have the right to ask lots of basic questions and rebuild my set of assumptions that undergird my way of working.


I thought a good step forward for me is to attend the workshop "Training request? Ask questions first.". Even the title sounded really apt for me then. 


What I picked up from the session wasn't rocket science but somehow, the learning points were a lot more relevant to me. 


Building relationships with our clients (agencies) is an important step towards understanding their training needs. By relationships, we don't mean the usual "Hi"s and "Bye"s or the acquaintance-type of relationship. It goes deeper than that. We need to know the other contact point as an individual (like how you want to learn more about your friend), and their mental interpretation of the organization they work in. In short, we need to understand our client agency from the eyes of our key contact point. 


But.......have we engaged these people enough to do that? Maybe not at the moment, but I believe we are moving towards that state.


One of the most common mistakes we could potentially make is that we tend to enter into a conversation with our key contact from our client organization with an assumption that their workforce would not be too different from yesterday's cohort. As such, we may not always pay as much attention to the details we received from our contacts, and we seldom try to diagnose the root of the problem. This invariably led us to help our client organization resolve the symptoms that exhibited itself, only to have clients returning with a different set of symptoms arising from our stop-gap measures. 


Can we then instill a habitual discipline internally to diagnose our clients' description of their situations or when they articulate their "training needs"? 


If we need to do the above, we must master the art of reframing our client's requests. This meant that we should not be too quick to offer suggestions or opinions within the first 10 minutes of the conversation. Our purpose should be to listen intently to the client's opinions and repeat it back to them to make sure we are hearing them correctly. Our key purpose here is to let the clients listen to what they just told us. Sometimes, they may simply discover the answers themselves after we repeated their stories and reframed their requests back to them. 


These 3 simple points will serve to remind me that questions are important to clarify a training request. Kudos to the trainer, Dick Handshaw!


Garvin, the freshman

Dick exhorting us to engage our clients