Looking forward to a one day ‘Train the Trainer’ programme I’d booked to attend, I was brimming with enthusiasm and imagining the many different ways I would be able to use the material with clients.

The end product turned out to be a let-down.

The content wasn’t the issue; it was the delivery that failed to live up to expectation for several reasons:

1. TIME IS PRECIOUS: it is to me anyway. I had a long drive from Manchester to the venue and had calculated that my time on the road was worth it for seven hours of training. In reality we received just four and a half hours of input; and had I known that in advance I would have been less likely to justify the trip

2. VALUE FOR MONEY: This course wasn’t; not only because we weren’t afforded enough time. It was clearly an ‘off the shelf’ workshop without any attempt to tailor it to the group, which wasn’t how it was marketed

3. EXPERIENCED FACILITATOR: This they were; and yet we were unable to benefit from their vast knowledge and expertise. Any member of the team (with enough confidence) could have delivered that programme which was read off a Power Point with a pre-prepared manual

These gripes could have been mitigated – or eradicated altogether – had the course been accurately promoted. I was aggrieved because they told me one thing and delivered another.

As delegates we should have been able to influence the agenda in order to ensure we took from it what we needed; and we weren’t given the option to do that.

Driving home I wondered how the organisers would have reacted upon hearing these views. We weren’t asked for our feedback however and so they will never know. I did overhear a couple of delegates complaining that they felt short-changed and was glad it was someone else’s training programme they were talking about.

The moral of the story: we can all do better and that’s okay; but unless we ask for feedback how will we know what’s working well and what isn’t? I would rather invite opinion and then take the opportunity to make things better, wouldn’t you?