I recently read an article which listed the 10 most stressful jobs. While entries such as IT, Medical/Nursing, Civil Engineering were some of the jobs which we come across in many such listing, I was surprised to find ‘Teaching’ making to the top 10 list.
Wait !!! Did I read it correctly? Yes , it is indeed teaching. Why on earth the teachers are stressed out ? They are the ones who get to go on holiday along with the children every year and the syllabus changes very rarely so they don’t have to keep themselves on track unlike a computer programmer who jumps from ‘C’ to ‘C++’ , ‘Java’ , to I2EE and Ruby on wheels and countless other stuff coming into the market everyday.
I didn’t have to wait long to see why teaching is stressful when I took up a week long teaching assignment recently. So now you know why there were no articles again after my holiday. Yes I spent most of my time preparing the information related to the training. Time to let a little secret about myself. I am an Oracle Applications (ERP) consultant for about 10 years now. So when this assignment to train came , I took it since I’ve worked hands on all the topics and confidently faced the clients all these years.
But teaching is a different ball game altogether. When I walk in as a consultant, I talk less, observe , listen more and when I talk it is only for shorter duration and very crisp. I do presentations and that again is anything between half a day to 2 days at the maximum. But this is a full 5 day training and ranges on 6 modules of the Applications Suite which has gone through 3 changes in 3 years.
The constant talking, demo , slides presentation and doing all this equal sequence while fielding the questions from the crowd and still maintain a good tone so I don’t put the class to sleep was a fantastic challenge. So here I was trying to give some good meaty stuff so the students ( all professionals, with about 5-10 years experience in this fields) go back with something more than what is in the slide. I still have a few queries which I’ve brought back since I have to dig more to find an answer. Have you ever tried your investigation skills in user guide that gives you a vague outline of the functionality and the system that respond neither according to the user guide nor according to your logic?
Finally I am happy that the assignment is over and it was successful too.
Conclusion : Training / Teaching ( can they be used interchangebly ?) is stressful if you are talking on a subject/application which is constantly changing and if you are not used to continuous talking. But is it really so for those not so constantly changing ones?
Why don’t you share your thoughts and experience too.
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