Training Days

When I first joined the pharmaceutical industry 15 years ago, I thought training was a simple issue. I assumed that I would get a few hours of instruction from my manager (perhaps supplemented by very occasional external courses) and that I would then be expected to work out how to apply that training to my day-to-day work for myself. That was it. That’s what training meant to me. I had no idea that trainers could be hired to deliver training internally. I thought ‘conferences’ were lengthy events where you presented your PhD thesis on a poster to academics who pretended to be interested out of kindness and a sense of duty. The Internet and e-learning didn’t exist. Mentally, ‘coaching’ and ‘sport’ were inextricably linked. How naïve.

Today, in mid-career, I am fortunate to have had direct experience of numerous perspectives on training. During my pharmaceutical career, I progressed from novice through developing professional to manager of multiple functions. In the service sector, I began as a departmental manager, took the opportunity to become a trainer (of internal staff and of feepaying external delegates), went on to become a global business leader in my company and, finally, took on responsibility for the management of my organisation’s commercial training division. At no point in this progression did I think to myself ‘this is great, I’m receiving an awful lot of training here’. Looking back, however, I was certainly very fortunate with what was available to me, and the things that I learned are applied in each and every day’s work that I do.