A New Perspective on Training

I worked as an aerospace engineer for nearly 20 years and the annual refresher training was always a dreaded task. I shudder to think about how many hours of my life I spent mindlessly clicking through videos and taking online assessments.

Now that I’ve taken on a role as the president of Nourish Madagascar I’ve really changed my mind about the value of training. I’ve got to ensure that each of our partner villages maintain proper health standards, fill out the daily forms correctly and align with our nutrition guidelines for menu planning. Making sure that everyone knows what is expected of them and what their role will be is crucial — feeding children is a serious undertaking and there isn’t room for improvisation when it comes to health standards or financial reporting.

Fortunately, last year I was able to collaborate with the graduate students of the Organizational Psychology Department at CSULB on creating training programs. I was appreciative for the offer for help from Dr. Chris Warren, but to be honest I still had my old skepticism from my aerospace days. I was also concerned about the cultural barriers. There are huge differences between the US and Madagascar in how people approach authority, come to consensus, and voice concerns.

The students did a remarkable job and put incredible energy into the task, communicating directly with our Regional Manager Finaritra to put together training packages for Finance, Health, and Nutrition.

Only about half of our villages were trained due to the timing constraints of our season and the results were startling. The villages that took the full training had much higher performance that the ones who had not. Most of these villages were new to our program, yet they had many fewer problems and better feedback from the parents.

After seeing such a noticeable difference, we expanded our training modules at our leadership conference in July and began the months long process of traveling to each village and offering courses to the volunteer parent groups. Our training was all in group sessions, so at least there weren’t any online assessments!

I’m really excited to see the impact of our latest round of training for all our programs this year. I have very high hopes!

Again, a special thanks to the CSULB Organizational Psychology students for their role in getting us started and a special thanks to Finaritra and the whole team for spending many days traveling by moto to present everything to our partner schools!!