Don't forget the feedback

Feedback is important in plenty of areas, particularly in training. The mantra in training delivery is: give feedback when it isn't asked for and ask for feedback when it hasn't been offered. Both my wife and my younger son have been on training courses this week and their experiences have been very different.

My younger son has been on an induction course at Pretty Big Employer Ltd which gave him an opportunity to meet a range of fairly new starters from around the organisation and learn something about the history of the business. He seems to have enjoyed the experience immensely which is fine. The training seems to have managed the mix between socialisation and content pretty effectively.

On the other hand, my wife was at a regional course on Tuesday which was supposed to be the last word on how to improve an aspect of her College's delivery and she came home spitting feathers, complaining that the trainer was completely useless and unaware about the impact of legislative changes occurring in her area of provision. She deliberately didn't complete her feedback form while she was on the course and brought it home last night so that she could compose something suitably scathing. Now, I don't know the process for analysing those forms or indeed who reads them, but I'm in no doubt that the course designer and the trainer could both learn something fairly useful from that feedback form.