Head of
Training Centre
I spent five years building training at the training centre of an international industrial automation vendor, then carried the same approach into support. I teach technically complex products rather than general subjects: twelve years of engineering practice behind me means I work through the material myself instead of narrating someone else's slides.
Before and after
The point of the distance format is not saving money. It is that a learner starts on the day they ask, instead of waiting for a group to fill up.
Content and channels
- Recorded 58 video lessons on the software product, arranged in six parts
- Built a partner training channel: 1,130 subscribers in two years, organically, with no promotion spend
- Ran eight internal webinars, training 382 colleagues from commercial departments
- Launched the company's first multi-day paid training: forty hours, with the division earning over a million roubles
The logic of the channel is simple: a routine question is answered with a link to a video rather than an hour-long call. The same trick later went into the public FAQ section at another employer.
Assessment in five stages
- Training: ten courses and a learning portal
- Self-check: a bank of 284 questions across ten blocks
- An AI conversation simulator: practice on scenarios, not on live customers
- Exam: one hundred questions drawn from the bank
- Grade: the result governs access to the line and affects pay
Assessments come out at 87-98%. The question bank is balanced by the position of the correct answer and by option length, otherwise the test is passed by guesswork rather than knowledge.
Methodology, not a pile of slide decks
- Course specifications, trainer instructions, marking criteria for exam assignments
- Content source separated from layout: the edit goes into the source and the course is rebuilt from it
- A twelve-seat training room designed for the job: all machines restored in ten minutes instead of a day
- At the next employer I built three product courses and a knowledge base of 130 articles