My experience of Core Role 4

Looking back at Core Role 4, I feel this was actually the Core Role that I enjoyed the most.  This was because it took me past my nervousness at public speaking and gave me the confidence to present myself well in all aspects of my life.  It also taught me about my learning style and also my teaching style, which, I have to say, is probably a little informal.

There were aspects of this Core Role that had particular challenges in terms of the assessors.  Sometimes developing a rationale for training can be as problematic as developing a rationale for research.  Although it is understood that as a trainee you need to provide exemplars, there is no room for developing training "for the sake of it".  Assessors will pick up on this and will question whether the training was really needed by your organisation, and this in turn will suggest to them that you might not entirely understand how to identify learning and training needs in the context of working within your organisation.

On the other hand, sometimes you identify a need and there is little appetite for meeting it within the organisation.  I found that exploring literature around change and growth in organisations can help in this situation.  It can help you understand any resistance you meet and can help you develop strategies to get past this.  What you must do is provide evidence for the assessors to prove that you understand how to identify learning and training needs and that you can bring the organisation on board.

Another hurdle that you might need to overcome might be in the case of your organisation directing you to deliver training and the training is mandatory.  In these cases it is harder to demonstrate why you have identified the training needs and how you select appropriate participants for your training.  Instead, you might have to reflect on what you could do under different circumstances or perhaps you could do some additional work to check the need within your population.

With mandatory training it is vital that you consider the motivations to attend and what this might mean for people's willingness to engage and learn. It is important to consider what will affect a person's motivation to learn and how you will account for this and address this in your training.

Finally, a focus for the assessors is how you evaluate training.  They will want to see that you have used literature and research to develop evidence-based methods of determining if people have learnt from your training session.  Usually this is a form of questionnaire but you will have to have clearly demonstrated through your evidence why you have chosen this method and your reflections on your chosen method.  A final part to this will be evaluating your evaluation method through reflection.  Did your evaluation really test what you wanted it to?  What could you have changed?  What would you do next time?  They will also want to see how you have learnt and how you have applied these changes to your next training programme or seminar.

I should note that whilst a reflection on learning styles and how you have catered for them in your training is often wanted by the assessors, there is a huge amount of literature available recently which rejects the theory of learning styles.  You may want include and consider this when you are developing your training.