For the goaters who have asked and for my old Technology Update instructor here's the answer to the question why are you going TB? (Its a bit of a long read)
The thoughts of an old guy upon his retirement.
It’s not true to say I liked my job, I loved my vocation and was pleased to arrive at work everyday getting paid for doing something that brought me great enjoyment. Imparting knowledge to the future RAF, gaining immense satisfaction from the progression of young people. The important task was delivering training all else was peripheral and existed to serve as a mere support function of the important training effort. Oh how things have changed, support staff now outnumber those that deliver training. We have an air force once recognised as providing the best training in the world, an air force, my air force, that taught up to a standard that has now been replaced by a corporate monolith which exists only to teach down to a price. A place where a student merely undertakes the process without being given the time to develop a full understanding of the process, a place where passion for the job has been obliterated, where an exam mark of 75% is viewed as a 15% over teach when 60% is all that is required to pass.
Instructional staff seen as mere pawns in the game, as the smallest of the myriad insignificant cogs in the big corporate machine. Devalued and unconsulted the body asked always to do more in less time, with fewer resources and the body blamed for all the training machines ills. Exalted to teach smarter, to upskill, to complete some course or other to move forward, become a champion and also satisfy the stats department. To blindly accept the imposition of change, to never question that change and improvement are two very distinct activities. Improvement is progress, is betterment and has value whilst change is merely simple change imposed by dictat from above. Over time the question has spun a full 180 degrees. Instructors were once asked “What kit do you need and how long will it take to impart x amount of knowledge on a given subject to the student body?” That premise has been replaced with “You have y hours, a laptop and how much of subject x can you cram in”. The soul has been un-ceremonially ripped out of training.
Process and protocol have overridden the teaching of students. For example in early 2017 to shut two workshop toolkits at the end of the day needed 10 signatures. Yes 10 signatures for the process of merely closing 2 toolkits at cease work. The time burden involved is huge over the duration of the exercise but such was the convoluted nature of the regulations being imposed at the time.
The requirement to be in date with a myriad of niff naff online courses is now seen as more important than teaching. The great god of stats must be placated at all costs, bean counters need stats to count. Without meaningless stats to collate why would we even employ such people? The need to be in date with something as low grade as the on line office desk safety video or display screen equipment or proper chair adjusting methods is used as yet another stick to beat the poor instructor with. There are 18 different courses, or training events that I as an instructor am required to have either undertaken or be in date with, right now, today, yes 18 reasons to be away from my primary tasking of actually delivering training. There needs to be a major seismic shift in emphasis where the delivery of training is once again placed at the centre of what we do. The sacred cow of stats is to be dragged kicking and mooing it’s last towards the bolt gun of reality. A place where subjects are delivered at the correct level rather than skimmed over in order to be delivered at the reduced cost and in a period count that is now 15% smaller than the 20 % reduction, sorry compression, that was forcibly introduced last time things were changed.
The concept that an Instructor is able to manage his own course of students is also virtually none existent. We as a body are deemed incapable of deciding when the students have achieved what is expected of them today, we are seen as too inept to decide when to terminate an exercise, to incompetent to make any form of decision about when to end the learning experience for the day. Most Civilian instructors were previously responsible SNCO’s within the Royal Air Force running teams of people, signing for multi million pound aircraft and happily assuming the plethora of roles expected of an effective SNCO. Yet these same individuals now seemingly lack the talent, skillset, intellect and decision making ability to decide when 16 SAC’s can leave a building. SAC’s some of whom have completed active tours of dangerous places, SAC’s who are married men with small children of their own. Pathetic
The joy and sense of fulfilment has now been surgically removed from the job. Corporate business speak turns up at meetings, students are customers, and staff are just resources to be allocated like workbenches to students. But most assuredly we are not just assets to be counted, we are people with different needs and aspirations. Training is not an exact science and cannot be timed like an assembly line process. The training machine once had people at its heart a fact that now seems strangely forgotten. Policy, direction of travel and future planning now occurs remotely in the air conditioned, corporate clip board, e-mail agenda driven, tablet holding, offices of people, most of whom, have never delivered a single minute of single subject with the confines of class room or supervised a training exercise on the hangar floor. Those ethereal beings that are dis-connected from the reality of training, those that inhabit a distinct and separate place far removed from the actual world of training delivery.
If you have read this far I thank you for your forbearance and fortitude. Yet the saddest, most disappointing, frustrating, anger inducing thing of all is the sense that there is sadly, a complete and utter pointless futility in my words. The words above will be unheeded, ignored and dismissed because the corporate ship has its course set and its destination preordained and the mere thoughts a simple instructor are as nothing to the relentless forward progression of the master plan. So very sad indeed. I should be leaving with a warm glow of contentment, with memories of years well spent and time well used yet it is nothing like that.
I leave with a heavy heart having been witness to the beginning of the end of RAF engineering training. A system carefully nurtured, assembled and honed over many decades being dismantled and demolished on the altar of the dollar where the cost of something far outweighs the worth of something. As one of the greatest ever engineers in English history Isambard Kingdom Brunel said “Great things are not done by those who think only of the cost of such things”.
DT_Xtremez_25:
