Following a frustrating day yesterday, I thought I would share my experience, so that you can see things from a trainer’s perspective – and hopefully avoid being the cause of similar problems. Oh, and Tech alert – I shall be going into a certain amount of detail about Excel. You don’t need to understand it (call me for training…) but read through anyway, because it wasn’t the technical side of things that was the issue.
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I have been training PC users for many years, and specialise in Excel. Yesterday, I delivered an Advanced Excel course on an NHS site that I have visited many times before. Eight delegates attended – all, I presumed, keen to get to grips with the technically challenging aspects of the program.
Well, most of them may have been. But three delegates in particular ruined the course for the others. I am used to seeing a certain range of expertise on this course, but I had two delegates whose previous knowledge was extremely limited. They occasionally work on spreadsheets designed by other people, typing in some numbers. They knew a bit of formatting to make it look pretty, and perhaps sometimes use the AutoSum button to provide column or row totals. For some reason, they thought this qualified them to attend the Advanced course (though a perfectly decent Intermediate course is available within the organisation). By choosing the wrong course, they held it up for everybody else while I had to walk them through each step. This happens sometimes and it is deeply frustrating for me and for the delegates who were actually capable of following the advanced topics.
The third problem delegate was, however, a whole new experience for me. He was self-taught – to a moderately decent standard, actually – but was not at all receptive to new ideas. I started the day with a gentle look at the VLOOKUP function, aimed at getting my less advanced users on board with functions. [Tech bit: VLOOKUP is one of the most commonly used functions in Excel: it displays a looked-up value from a table. You might use it to look up an ID in your list of customers, and give you their email address. You can use it in multiple places, so that when you type that ID in one cell, all the looked-up values fill instantly with the correct details]. Well, this person was having none of it. “I’ve never seen the point of VLOOKUP – it’s just a gimmick”. He told me that he manually filters his data to find the result he wants, then copies the required information across. Every single time. For every single piece of data. And no matter how much I (or several of the other delegates) tried to persuade him otherwise, he insisted that he knew better. He continued in this way for the rest of the course: every single topic was “I don’t see the point of this”, “Why would I want to use that?” – and aggressively too, not in a spirit of enquiry. He was proud of the fact that, when he encounters a problem in Excel, he finds a way to bodge an answer using his current skills, rather than attempting to learn how to solve the problem efficiently by actually extending his knowledge.
If you are thinking about booking a training course, do please be honest with yourself about your real level of ability. Sometimes it’s better to do a course below the level you think you need, just to make sure you are up to speed, before leaping into the unknown. Oh, and please come prepared to LEARN NEW STUFF!
