Training sessions

This week I taught my first training session. I was training our project partners on our metadata fields (based on Dublin Core), and on features of the new version of ContentDM. I had lots of levels of experience in the class, from librarians to volunteers, people familiar with the previous version of ContentDM and people who had never used it, and people unfamiliar with PCs all the way to tech-savy web designers. Even with all of these levels, there were only about 10 people in the class. I think the session went well. At least no one fell asleep. I’m looking forward to getting more experience with this type of training and becoming more comfortable explaining concepts to a class. Until this class, I had never talked in front of a group of people for more than 20 minutes. And previously my presentations had all been prepared presentations, while a training session needs to be more spontaneous. In my “previous life,” as a musician, I performed many recitals, and I think that the skills I developed doing this translate nicely into my new profession. Even though I’m not used to talking to a group for very long, I am used to standing in front of an audience and keeping their attention for an entire recital. However, I was always intimidated by the thought of speaking to my audience.

For one of my job interviews this year, I had to give a presentation on what makes a great trainer. Unfortunately at that time I didn’t have any experience with training, and the presentation I put together was purely academic. However, it was a good reason to spend time thinking about this subject. I feel that library school didn’t prepare me for this area. I never had to give a presentation longer than 10 minutes in library school, while in the “real world” librarians must give presentations and present training sessions on a regular basis. I’m looking forward to developing this skill and becoming more comfortable with public speaking.