Introduction

Both the title of this piece and the image above point to a prism through which the majority of my professional or academic endeavors thus far can be viewed, that of service and edification.  Most often during my professional career, I have been in some form a teacher or instructor, a supervisor and Lead of my team, or most recently a Training Coordinator for my company.  This time as Coordinator especially I consider to be a culmination of much of my professional development thus far and is the topic of this examination.  I mention my other experiences because they highlight common threads that have remained constant throughout so much of my professional journey as a whole: leading, mentoring, knowledge-sharing, advising, assisting my peers.  However, heading and building a Training Program almost from the ground up has been an experience not quite like any other, even as I approached it with the confidence and expertise afforded to me by my earlier endeavors.

Skills and Insights Gained

As the Training Coordinator for this company, I was tasked with a variety of responsibilities including carrying out the training course itself, which was the most familiar aspect of this role.  I had been a teacher before primarily during my time as a language instructor in Europe and in fact I had already taken on other smaller training duties for my fellow Passenger Service Agents at the airport even before I was asked to become Coordinator.  However, as now the designated Training Coordinator for my company, I was not only responsible to be an instructor but also a primary point of contact for any training needs, an intellectual architect, a visual designer, an advisor, a record keeper and finally the deliverer of said Training program in its useable form as measured against both my company’s and represented airlines’ standards. 

Where in previous instructor roles my focus rested primarily on the interpersonal complexities of the classroom teaching itself and communicating knowledge or expectations in a format already prescribed to me, now I was able to craft and mold the entirety of a training program in the manner I saw fit to meet more abstract guidelines and goals.  As such, I finally had an agency and decision-making power that I never had previously, and so in the truest sense thus far in my career I felt a sense of ‘ownership’ and caretaking for what I had created.  However, I also gained in this role a deeper understanding of the art of translating explicit knowledge, expertise, rules, and guidelines given to me by others into a teachable form and then distilling that structured program even further into engaging classroom training, discussion, and knowledge-sharing.

Lessons Learned

Beyond the art of presentation and teaching, the entirety of this experience as a Training Coordinator helped define for me what I was creatively, practically, and authoritatively capable of when I had no one except myself to hold accountable in evaluating the results and products of my efforts.  This felt very liberating and created a sense of self-confidence and pride that was quite a bit more comprehensive than I had known up to this point, even as proud as I have been of all of my achievements until then.  The practical skills I gained while being a Coordinator are clear:  utilizing various web, spreadsheet, word-processing or presentation applications; creating organized and well referenced sources for instruction that are also useable by others; obtaining and deciding the best ways to act upon feedback from participants, colleagues, and management; marking and measuring improvement of the curriculum over time and so on and so forth.  However, being both the Teacher and the ‘Training Architect’ in this position also honed my ability to manage my time and creative mental output in a much more structured, directed, and self-assured manner. 

Impact

Taking on this position was itself the logical outgrowth of a great many journeys of self-discovery that came before it as a teacher or instructor, yet it has also proven to be one the clearest hallmarks of my desire to be of service and to educate others. For me the image at the start of the writing represents two of the most integral aspects of this service ideal that I have always strived to embody:  the outstretched hand to show my willingness to listen, share and help others in earnest and with compassion, and the refracted colors of light on the hand to show my recognition that teaching and sharing knowledge can take a wealth of shapes and forms and is as rich and complex a process of discovery as we make it for ourselves. Of course, all this can at times take great bravery and great boldness and even then, great patience. However, this trajectory has been one of intense personal and intellectual fulfillment for me and having now managed the role of being a Training Coordinator to great success, I understand more clearly and more precisely where my mentoring strengths and passions lie.