View Training in a Positive Light

Learning new skills is often both interesting and adds value to an employee’s resumé and talents. Yet sometimes there are training sessions that can leave much to be desired, and employees who have had this experience on one or more occasions, may adopt a negative attitude toward training sessions in general.

The sad reality is that employees who have developed this distaste for training have done so for good reason. Training sessions that are designed to merely reinforce what the majority of attendees already know will quickly bore trainees. New ideas, procedures, and/or policies, if not delivered in a comprehensive and clear fashion, will invariably just add to the already existing confusion. And Q&A sessions with a leader that is unable to provide concise answers to the group's questions, will also be most unsatisfying.

Much as time-wasting meetings generate negativity, training sessions can also create an aura of negativity with employees, which can then affect productivity and performance.

Put Training in a Positive Light
While employees sometimes don’t have overwhelming influence on either the topics or methods of training, there are things you can do to get the most out of good, and even not so good, education sessions. Here are a few suggestions to help training time become positive time.

• Treat training time as an investment in your future. Face it: training sessions – even good ones – aren’t always exciting. They’re not built to be pure entertainment, but even the most uninspiring training meetings, will contain at least one thing that you didn’t know. Everything you learn adds to your knowledge, and the larger your knowledge base, the higher your chances of advancing in your career.
  
  
• Take an inventory of your skills and determine where you need to improve. Everyone can use additional skills to perform better. By listing and rating your current skills, you’ll develop a ‘picture’ of where you rank with your company and with your career. You will also develop a sense of the skills or abilities needing some improvement. Take advantage of training sessions that may add to your skill set, and attend these with a positive commitment to get the most benefit from the information.
  
  
• Develop a ‘learning attitude’ and take it with you to training classes. If you’ve played sports or read any positive reinforcement material, you know that attitude is everything. Becoming or continuing to be negative about training sessions will erect a large barrier to your progressive learning. You’ll find yourself ‘tuning out’ the trainer, taking shoddy notes, or unconsciously rejecting some good information. But with the right attitude, you’ll find yourself taking away valuable information from even the most boring training classes.
  
  
• Establish a connection to your job or your career at every training session. There will be training topics that you might feel have little connection to your current duties. People tend to tune out what they believe is useless information. But, you risk missing some valuable knowledge. Listen to the trainer and find a connection to your current or future career goals. Mentally establishing this connection will allow your mind to look at the training information in a very different – and positive – light.

Turning a negative attitude into a positive outlook toward training is really not difficult, and is totally your choice. You might even find that some of these sessions, which seemed to drag on for hours, will now fly by. You may even want them to last longer so you could learn more!

Worst case: you will continue to find some training uninspiring. But by changing your attitude, you are sure to develop better skills, that you can then translate into new abilities, and then into new career opportunities.

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