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Business Continuity Training not cutting the mustard!
By admin | September 6, 2007
Some time ago, it was common for people delivering business continuity training to spend the entire training period describing to participants what they needed to consider. It was a backdoor way of highlighting to clients the overwhelming mountain of work they needed to climb to deliver on business continuity. It was a way of describing how big their problem was, and of course if trainers appeared knowledgeable then perhaps the participants would take away one of their business cards and invite them over to help them with their problem. I always thought it was a bit underhand, charging people to go on a course, illustrating the amount of work involved and then generating the fear factor as a means to get more business.
Perhaps I am being a bit mean. What if the trainers are just reading the slides they were given? What if the trainers had been academics and are now teaching at the Emergency Planning College at Easingwold? What if they don’t have experience of implementing continuity solutions in organisations. Without this experience they are relying on slides and presentations they have seen or books they have read. In all fairness, they are capable of describing the problem rather than helping people develop solutions.
After I gave a lecture in Chichester last night, one of the audience came to me. Knowing of my experience of working in Business Continuity he mentioned he had recently attended a course on Business Continuity. He recanted how the trainers had managed to describe how much work was involved, what the issues were but were not able to offer simple, pragmatic solutions to the problem. I looked at this man, a good honest man. I’ve known him for a long time and I became incensed that despite the fact his organisation had paid good money to a reputable organisation he has still been given the same shtick after all this time.
People are paying for training to help them better deal with big serious problems and all they get is the problem redefined. If you are involved in Business Continuity training then make sure you are able to offer solutions to the problems you highlight. Its not just this industry and General CW and team at Easingwold are not the only culprits, its all over. Lets change it, lets provide training and expertise that can really cut the mustard.
Topics: Business Continuity |