The payback isn’t considered in terms of days but in terms of years. In due course, you will find that you have more experience, more fundamental knowledge, more contacts, and more successes than your peers. As the need happens for an experienced, seasoned, successful project manager, who is your company going to look for? Naturally, they are looking for the best.
Beyond training: Expanding your career horizons
As an instructor, you’re often asked to perform a variety of duties. You assumed the hats of trainer, performer, job counselor, consultant, help desk director, salesperson, and mentor. You are trained to master a variety of software applications and you may add some hardware experience to your resume. You, maybe, love your job, but you must wonder from time to time, "What's next?"
• Consulting
Instructors that mastered several software applications in a particular arena, say the Microsoft Office suite, may wish to try their hands at application consulting. Consultants teach a certain group, company, or department to tailor an application to their specific job functions. For example, some company may call in a consultant to provide a workflow solution and tailor the training for that solution. This can include building an Excel workbook, training certain employees on entering data, having Word build daily reports based on the data, and automating the entire process with the Microsoft macro language.
• Training manager
You may aim to management. If your personal skills are different across the technological arena, you may search for a job supervising other instructors. But all your skills may not be enough, so you might consider taking additional management courses or working toward a degree in the field of your choice. Keep in mind, that training managers always need to keep one foot in the software arena so their skills don't become outdated.
• The explainer
Counselors often graduate into writing. Since you have the full knowledge of the software, you can be the one to write the manual. Your knowledge in dealing with students can bring unique perspectives to aspects of the software that the developers may have missed. If you aren’t addicted to composing 200- to 300-page masterpieces, perhaps technical writing is more your style. Websites as a publishing houses are on the lookout for writers who can explain IT.
• Customized training manuals
Many companies have a need for manuals that explain how to use specialized or customized software. Finding out a role between the consultant and the explainer, this job will utilize your software experience, practical software use, and writing ability. Using notes for an example, you would provide the training manual for every employee on the features of notes relevant to that particular company.
• Bottom line
There are definitely more employment areas you could choose, and variations of traditional training are popping up with increasing frequency. If you are in the process of training solely for the software experience, please step back and see all the other skills there are to learn. Finally take your knowledge, apply it well, and never look back.
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