The training of trainers

“Give a man a fish, or teach him how to fish”

Negotiating skills are vital tools for employers’ organisations. Representing their members’ interests very often requires negotiating with trade union representatives on e.g. labour issues, or with governments on improving the business environment, or with both of them in what is often called a ‘social dialogue’.
DECP noted early on that improving their negotiating skills would allow our counterparts to be better negotiators and therefore better represent their members’ interests. Thus we turned towards the experienced negotiators of AWVN (the Dutch Employers Federation). Their expertise coupled with sophisticated and stimulating training methods turned out to be both effective and highly appreciated by our counterparts.
But we soon realised that we would not be able to meet all of the demand for negotiations training of our counterparts. We therefore concluded that the only way to meet their demand would be to teach and train potential trainers from within the employers’ organisations themselves.
So starting in 2009 we decided to put this into practice by assembling some 12 trainees (3 each from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania) in Kigali to be trained by Dirk Joosse and Marjolein Otter from the AWVN. From there we moved on and organised a number of training sessions in several East African capitals and addressed the various aspects of successful ‘interest-based’ negotiations.
The next step was for each of our trainees/counterparts to share their newly acquired knowledge, skills and expertise with colleagues in their respective organisations, in other words, be a trainer themselves. At the first training sessions by the newly ‘graduated’ trainers, AWVN and DECP were in attendance in order to assist, advise and coach.
Today we note with some satisfaction that the new trainers are organising training sessions entirely on their own. Training of trainers has turned out to be an effective instrument.
So effective that we have now answered a call from our Vietnamese counterparts and are currently training potential Vietnamese trainers.
In fact, we are considering replicating the approach in the field of Occupational Safety and Health (OSH).