Day 2: Pensacola Part 3 — The Training
By JoeBruin88. Filed in Career and Travels |Tags: Career, Navy, Pensacola, Travels, work
9:00 PM CST
First the clock radio in my hotel room went off followed by my cell phone alarm at 0600 hrs. I wanted to sleep in for a few minutes, but the annoying tada.mid sound from the cell phone would not shut off by itself so I had to get up and “acknowledge” the alarm. The day also welcomed me with a headache. I went to the hotel’s “Deluxe Continental Breakfast”, which totally stunk. Wow. I’ve just been writing a bunch of complaints. Switch gears.
Off to Corry Station, which is just down the road from the hotel. I could actually walk if I wanted to, but it was already 85 - 90 degrees Fahrenheit at 7:30 in the morning. So I drove in the comfort of my air-conditioned rental car. At the security gate, I was not even asked for some kind of verification or authorization. They took a look at my CAC card and just let me through. Good. I was slightly nervous, not about my presentation content or delivery, but whether or not the technical/computer gear would work. That’s why I planned for an extra hour to check out the classroom and get the glitches worked out.
And I’m glad I did because the image projected on the screen was upside down! It took some time for it to get worked. Then the next problem was that the presentation slide show would appear on the primary monitor but not on the computer screen. And that took another chunk of time to work out. The Navy instructors rolled in around 8:45 AM and I think we started at 9:00 AM. Today was also the first day of students starting their IT classes so they also had students to manage.
I felt good now that the equipment was working and began my talk. I find it interesting that once I got started I diverted from what I planned to say in my written-out notes and just decided to go impromptu based on what I had on the slides. I felt like the audience was tracking with me, nodding their heads. But after maybe fifteen minutes, I could tell that they were b-o-r-e-d. I mean blank stares. I surmised that they already knew what I was talking about.
After about an hour and finishing my second topic, I sent them on break. I then talked with one of the instructors I knew and he confirmed that they had been playing around, exploring the product on their own for about a week. One of the chiefs also confirmed this and so I planned to switch gears before the whole thing turned out to be a wash. I was able to touch base with my manager by phone and she confirmed that I was on the right track by wanting to shorten the training to one day, condensing the info since many of them already knew it.
After the break it went much better. I got the instructors to log in and go into our product. We worked on a few learning activities; they also had the opportunity to ask me questions on how to do things as they were in the middle of the activity. I thought this was going much better. They were engaged, no more blank stares. They had good questions. And I was still going through all the content I had planned, in a faster and more engaging way.
For lunch I went to the Chinese buffet place that I’d been to the last time I went to Pensacola. The place had changed ownership so now it was Japanese, called “Osaka Buffet”. At first I thought it tasted good, but then towards the end of lunch I started not to like it, very salty.
After lunch there was a Ribbon Cutting ceremony since today was the first day the schoolhouse had students. So I planned to continue after the ceremony and wrap everything today instead of having a second day of training, but only four or five instructors returned for the afternoon session! So I just suggested we continue tomorrow morning since what is left to go over is the most important part of the training.