August 24, 2017, by Jessica Watson

Building the training – Christina Harrison

When people pay me a compliment I’m always a little suspicious, so when my manager referred to my experience and strong relationships within the team I had an inkling that what came next would be less pleasant….

Some months on, I am officially running the new system training for Admissions staff alongside my lovely colleague David.

Me, an Expert User!

I will have worked in Admissions for nine years this August. During that time I’ve covered most of the different roles up to the point of Postgraduate Admissions Manager for the Science Faculty. I am now with a small, but perfectly formed group, Team Science. I find this highly amusing as I know next to nothing about Science and Technology, yet they picked me to train other people on a new computer system.

“Madness,” I hear you cry, but there may just have been method in their madness. I’m not a computer whizz and my experience in teaching relates to the accounts module of the licensed conveyancing course which is equally baffling but not at all relevant. I am however (I’m going to big myself up now but if it makes you feel better I’m cringing about it) pretty good with people. I’m happy to take time to show someone how to do something, to go back over it as many times as necessary and to find different ways to explain something until it does make sense. For this reason, and because I get on pretty well with most of the team (or they hide their disdain for me well), I was asked to be a trainer.

Team Training

This was sold to me as “train the trainer”, meaning Project Transform would train me and I would then train the team. In reality I’m learning alongside the trainer and we are developing the various training courses together. That’s, Ali, David and I (Team Training).

I won’t lie, it’s not always easy and things don’t always work as they should. However, between us and with a great deal of technical support, we are making progress and will shortly be running our next session on Fundamentals. These are the key functions within the new system our team will need to master.

Looking forward

So I’m not Wonder Woman but I’m here and I care and I’m a little bit excited by the prospect of a new and better system. It may not be totally new – the undergrads got there first and it may not seem better to start with, whilst we work things out but I’m optimistic that we will end up with a stronger system given a little time and patience.

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