the soft skills training as less important than operational or technical training because of the generic perception that empathic listening, for example, is more of a feminine quality.
As a trainer, I spend hours in Soft Skills trainings trying to overcome this barrier of carelessness of young men who believe that positive attitude, speaking behaviors and the feedback process are for those who can’t stand for themselves or those who care too much about what others might think.
And the advice delivered for this one is related to the trainer himself/herself, because the influence of the trainer is important to get through to that category of audience.
4. Language/Culture barriers; although English has been the business language in the Middle East for sometime now, a trainer delivering training in English will have his own challenges getting across to the audience, and I don’t mean here the normal accent neutralization problems.
Another issue presents itself here; when the trainer spends some time, not quite enough though, to localize his material when delivering to another culture and instead of showing off his knowledge of the trainee’s country, he will unintentionally insult or upset the audience.
A Serbian trainer was delivering a training to an Egyptian audience and he cracked a joke about Arabs in general and Egyptians in specific having no value of time and he even pronounced some Arabic words in a foreign accent like “yagama’a”, but I could tell that his joke didn’t get through because the attendees didn’t laugh and some faces were turning red!
The problem still persists even with Arabic trainers delivering trainings in other Arab countries. I had an Egyptian trainer delivering in Abu Dhabi, she didn’t have a problem communicating her ideas but it took some time for the audience to understand because her local version of ice breakers had to be adjusted to the attendees’ culture, although they speak the same language.
Shaimaa Mogahed is a certified creative trainer with a six sigma black belt & a COPC RC.
Shaimaa is a contact center Ninja who leads a small team of 30 trainers in Egypt’s largest contact center. She has 9 years of experience in contact center operations and training,
Soft Skills