It has always saddened me to denote that despite the fact that soft skills trainers have always shouldered the responsibility to bring up business professionals that are capable to stir the business and zoom it to the acme, there are still some sterile management mentalities and fossilized business leaders treat them as “The Others” or in the best scenarios “The Least Favorite Sector”.
These Bosses have assumed that the survival of their institutions depends highly and only on the Sales Teams. It is true that the sales and marketing teams play a good role in the training service, but the core value of any training project is the trainer.
In fact, Soft Skills Trainers are truly the Product that sales and marketing staff propagandize. Clients choose the training company basically because of the reputation the trainers make, not for the freely served coffee and tea; neither do they come for the books or the training materials. Besides, the soft skills’ training is a character – oriented business. So, the success of the training company is subject to the investment on the trainers, as well as their self esteem.
Treating soft Skills Trainers as “The Others” could be seen in many situations such as; considering the trainers’ preparation time as a free time, where they could be assigned any other irrelative task to achieve. Some managers don’t even count the preparation time in their daily hours so trainers cannot ask for overtime dues. Moreover, trainers do not usually receive commission like the sales staff. This is really frivolous, because it is the trainer who makes the revenues possible.
The Middle East region has become astonishingly mature enough to make a great deal of distinction between trainer – oriented business and figure – oriented companies. Those training companies that can’t cope with these new approaches will soon fade in the mist of other companies’ evolvement.
