Aim for Successful, not Stressful

Picture it, Sicily…Just kidding. Picture your dispatch center and your training team members. It’s possible at one time or another, that you’ve worked with someone who prides themselves on providing the trainee an experience of the highest stress. They often will mention that the job is stressful, so in order to prepare the new employee best, the training should be stressful as well. Sound familiar?

While it’s no secret that our role is indeed stressful, using this as a motivation for putting a trainee through a rigorous and often frustrating training experience won’t lead to success. This strategy will most likely lead to a frustrated and defeated trainee who may struggle through and complete the training or walk away from the job entirely. (That obviously does nothing to help with the staffing crisis.)

When training, information should be presented in a way that allows the trainee to be challenged without the challenge becoming frustration. We need some stress to learn and retain information, but too much and those abilities will be lost.

One analogy I often refer to is that of biking uphill from Julie Dirksen’s “Design for How People Learn.” If you were to have to bike uphill continuously, you would find yourself tired and working too hard to remember much or mentally too tired to even have a conversation. This is how it feels when we introduce multiple new concepts in training without providing the opportunity to practice them and the trainee to become more comfortable. What we must do instead is provide them with a road that flattens out or has a few downhill spots to “bike” (train) on. This way, they are able to operate more off of habit and what they’ve learned for a period of time before making their way uphill again and having to use up more energy. This can look like having them work on a new skill, such as call taking, and then going back and doing work on CAD or geography that they're already familiar with which requires less cognitive demand.

“Some challenges may increase the arousal response, which is necessary to engage and focus on an individual, but should challenge become too steep, the result is stress and anxiety, which is not optimal for high performance.” Sylvia Vorhauser-Smith

So, while it may be tempting to introduce multiple new concepts during that 8, 10, or even 12-hour shift to help “get through” the training process, it’s a recipe for failure. We must provide them with the concepts and information, allow them to practice and develop the skills or habits, then we can move on to the next step.