Handling Training/ Course Work

How to handle the extra workload linked to the training course (pre-work, project, etc.) 

And also, meet the commitments of your daily job? How to ensure you get the right kind of help/support from your supervisors and team members?Most of the professionals who want to expand on their domain, functional, or leadership skills are busy professionals with their day to day job responsibilities and other engagements to take care of. How to strike a balance between training needs and their other professional obligations. We asked some of our students from various industries and at various management levels the same question. Given below are some insights shared by them:

Prioritization is the key

It was indeed a challenge to balance between project work and the every-day tasks; however, I was able to manage the workload with prioritization and proper time management. During the project work, I received professional guidance from senior leaders and my manager as well. Some of the tasks had to be prioritized and my manager enabled this. I could not attend all calls due to conflicting priorities, but I made sure I attended these calls in a large proportion.

Manager Support is Essential

The key challenge for me was to balance the daily work and project expectations. It was manageable though and supported by my manager and the team. It was really a great challenge for me as during this year we worked on 2 projects and had to devote time to e-learnings. My daily job changed in the course of time. Every second day I had to stay in the office at least 2 hours longer. Working on a project for long hours. My manager was supportive, but I still had to deliver results.

Support from Family

That was one of the most challenging parts of the Program. TECHNOFUNC related work was mostly done out of office hours due to the serious workload with my job activities. I have received valuable support from home business functions that were involved in either 1st or 2nd learning projects. Working on assignments was a big pleasure despite long hours. I tried to organize my time and prioritize tasks differently in order to deal with training needs and daily jobs. The preparation for training, which also included pre-work, did not consume a lot of my time however I regret that I have not spent more time on learning. I find it definitely very useful but unfortunately involves a lot of time. My manager respects the time that I spend on training and he tries to not disturb me and does not pass on works. I appreciate that. Therefore during the training weeks, I was able to focus just on training.

With regard to the 1st course I took from technofunc – it has been treated as an integral part of my every-day tasks and therefore it was easily manageable in terms of time. If talking about the pre-work & 2nd international project, I believe it is always a question of being well organized. There were various challenges we were encountering (once running the projects) like variable schedules etc. forcing us to work harder and longer, but we’ve seen a common goal & kept supporting and motivating each other. Moreover, we were also aware, that both the training & pre-work will help us be more efficient at work later on & so it will pay-off in some time in the future. My team and my manager supported me during the whole course – I can delegate some of my daily work to my colleagues, my boss gave me more time for standard tasks when I needed it. I accepted very gladly e-learning courses, because of more time to understand new topics, acquire new special words in this topic and chance to discuss with some expert before our training. In my opinion, before the last session wasn´t enough time for finished e-learning on schedule because of needed work on the project (I had to finished e-learning at night on the hotel) – maybe there was a better longer time for e-learning before. For both of our project I worked usually at the weekend – it wasn’t easy in the context of my daily work but I feel it positive because everything was for my development.

Leveraging Weekends and Evenings

Actually, they didn’t quite fill in my daily job, but my evenings and weekends mainly. But the whole effort was worth it. I can proudly say that I’ve had great support from my direct manager and team members, as well as from my sponsors, and whenever I needed some help, they were there. My manager and team members were really supportive and they were also very interested in TechnoFun’s. After each week we had a team meeting where I presented covered areas to the whole team. It was tough. But I didn’t expect that it will be easy and I know that it is necessary to do extras – we have to somehow compensate invested money.

Price of Learning

Last year was really busy and my time was fully exploited. I had to work really hard to handle both learning duties and daily jobs. Sometimes I had to work after hours to finish everything, but I think that is the price of learning. In terms of support from my manager, I can say that it was understood that I had additional training duties and I didn’t receive any special additional tasks, which would have destroyed my plans. My manager was really helpful in terms of complete project assignments.

Leverage Industry Network

Unfortunately, the project assignment that I was involved in was not applicable to my business. However, in the long run, I believe it can be of relevance and therefore I will be able to help with the lessons learned from it. Most of the experience I gained while we were working on the project assignment. It was a real lesson in every aspect of project management. We had to gain information about existing the product, processes, how they look like, the data, marketing, etc. Since we are responsible for completely different things, without the support of other team members and people from various Departments success of the project could not be achieved. To contact relevant people we used of course our industry network.

Learn from Experience

Although participants constantly kept discussing various solutions applied in our businesses – even on the last day of our training, there is one on my mind I’d like to share with you. It is a solution (or rather a “best practice”) applied in the branches, we’ve been visiting. Once finishing the branch tour, our attention was caught by a simple graph pasted at the branch door. It was showing the “rush hours” in the branch depending on the customer segment (also taking into account cash transactions). We have straight away discussed & challenged the idea & came to a common agreement that posting such information in public display is not only allowing for managing customers’ expectations (in terms of queuing for instance) but also the workload & eventually also sizing in the branch. And therefore its implementation in our local businesses is absolutely worth to be considered.

Best Practices

In our assignment project, we needed to find the best practices from all over the world regarding primary banking. Considering the fact that most banks from CEE countries did not have English websites, we had great help from our colleagues who helped us with the needed materials. The network is very useful for sharing best practices among countries. As a result of the project the team had a possibility to compare and share best practices of collection approaches. Thanks to exchanging ideas among countries the collection processes will be improved in most of them.