I few days back i wrote a piece titled 7 simple steps that will help you get maximum out of your training. In it i promised to elaborate the points so here we go.
AS I have said earlier. Training has increased my skills, polished my knowledge and boasted my confidence. Though I was lucky to have DR. Ramamurthy, a hard taskmaster as my guide, I feel this 7 simple tips that follow will be applicable to everyone who is doing training no matter who is his or her guide.
So without further adieu let me begin
Concentrate on One Main Thing.
Concentrate on one main area of work during your training. If you want to be in design and then focus on design and if you want analysis, then focus on analysis. If your interest is programming then focus on that. Now as I have said earlier in this post, one needs to be clear about his motivation before joining training. IF that is clear then you will have no problem in focusing on your job at hand. See when I was in NAL, I have seen few folks not focused on there task and always grudging about the cool task the other person is doing in HYPERMESH. Yes it’s good to be fascinated with the software that your college or friend is working on but don’t loose your focus.
If you are already know what you want out of the training then you‘ll have no difficulty in staying focused.
What are the consequences of not staying focused?
- You loose interest in your main task that you have been assigned.
- Your work doesn’t reflect the true potential that you have.
- Since you began with one topic and now drifting to difference software or task, chances are you have two half-baked software skills. If might look on resume but might glaringly come out when you are in a technical interview.
So what can you do?
3 simple steps.
- Before joining any training know why you are joining? Have a clear goal for your training. If you don’t have a goal, Do it now. See what you want to take away from this training? Write that purpose down. Make it short but write it. In my days of training my focus was to apply my aeronautics knowledge and to create software aerospace or engineering tools. And I concentrated my maximum time on the activities that lead to me to fulfill my focus area.
- Now when you know you are to focus on one area of your training, chalk out the activities that you need to do. Some will be related to the task you are assigned by your guide. Align them to your focus area. One of the tasks I got while in NAL was development of an access database for the account database. So where was my aerospace knowledge here? Since I was assigned to do this work, I learned access to accomplish this and then applied this access learning skills to create a database of all the data of military engines that I had for my work on gas turbine engine of a UAV. So work with your focus area always in your mind.
- Get a small percentage of your time to do that fascinating thing that that your friend on the next computer is doing. Yes programming and making software tools was exciting, but seeing my friend doing magic and creating all those colorful graphs in fluent was also mesmerizing. So everyday I took half an hour and tried my hands on that software if I got the change. This is how I tried so many software including NASTRAN, HYPERMESH, UNIGRAPHICS, GAMBIT etc. Doing this not only gave me a welcome relief from my work but also opened up opportunity to see how my primary focus area skills can be applied to this software.
So these are my thoughts on the training. This post itself got longer than interned. So I’ll be post the other tips for getting the maximum out of your training in my next post.
Related : 3 things i have learnt in NAL during training!
