Education and development of local trainers
Category: Bank Management
Anyhow, at least in the medium term, the support to change provided by training requires local trainers. In fact, qualified trainers are one of the most important resources for training centers. Having efficient local trainers becomes thus a major condition for to-morrow’s success. Even if exchange of trainers remains an accurate tool to enhance their knowledge and enrich the offer.
But, identification of suitable local trainers often appears to be quite difficult: Although there are qualified candidates with sufficient academic background, they often lack bank experience.
Moreover, it is important to identify people who do not only have the required know-how and bank experience (in order to be accepted by trainees), but who also have specific training skills. To attract them, a training center shoud give local trainers a stable employment, a competitive salary and attractive incentives and career perspectives.
There still remains the need to provide good monetary and non-monetary incentives in order to foster long-term collaboration between training centers and local trainers: rewards for courses with high participants ratings, further engagements provided, to have the opportunity to be sent abroad is a powerful incentive, etc.
There is also a problem concerning disponibility, as many local trainers are bank employees. Hence, il is necessary to convince banks that they benefit from their employees training activities: trainers do acquire new skills and new techniques through teaching. Often, one learns even more being a teacher instead of a student. Banks may also get additional prestige vis-а-vis other banks, if their employees prove to be skilled trainers Instead of that, banks’ scarcest resources remain their skilled employees. Nowadays, they are needed to manage and operate their rapidly growing and frequently unstable business. Indeeed, in this environment, banks are often unwilling to pool such resources and find it difficult to make their key staff available for training.
However, no matter how good trainers are, their contribution will be limited if they are not managed properly and motivated or if their work is not supported within the organisation. »
A more structured approach for the achievement of the self-sustainability of local training centers would then be beneficial to all concerned. It will be based on their aptitude to improve their:
— marketing and public relations strategies (to make their supply better known),
— local trainers (western trainers cannot be paid by the revenues raised),
— development of diversification of their offered training products,
— systematic long-term education programs (well structured long-range approaches, training programs, curriculum and guidelines for the bank staff),
— business programming and management.
This may partly rely on co-operation between training centers: exchange of information, very concrete common activity plans focussing on future development of joint projects, exchange of course materials (redundancies when creating new material -for instance glossaries- should and could be avoided).
But as inter-banks seminars are not usually the most effective to bring about changes, it is necessary to insist also on the importance of developing internal training courses (that can often be considered as one of the most performant possible assistance practice) designed to meet specific needs.
There is thus a need for the improvement of in-house training capacities. In order to gain more flexibility, some C.I.S. banks have already developed their own training programs, other build up internal training departments to train their staff. After course fees had been introduced, the response has been less intensive and banks have built up their own training facilities. We even think that most of the training efforts should be, more and more, task directed and « on-the-job » trainings. This is why Ebtra has conceived its M.O.C. module named « Developing in-house training capacities ». We assume that this module can there be of a great usefulness as it describes all the main functions of the job. « This course has actually being designed to help in the conception and management of training, in association with external experts. It covers topics such as « managing an in-house training department » or « preparing training programs and materials and introducing « training the trainers » facilities to increase the training resources, etc. » (see detailed summary of this module in Annex 2).