Training expenditure in the middle east during recession and slowdown

For the last one month I had been tracking almost all the leading corporations of the UAE like Emmar, Dubai world, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Dubai Islamic bank, Aldaar, Burj-Al-Arab,Emirates and Air Arabia to name a few, while training my students who represent different organizations across sectors.Recession is cascading all across and all the economies are affected in one way or the other.However, the smart corporations across the globe and few of them I observed here in UAE gave me the belief that you cannot invoke cost cutting in a very way especially when its related to brand building and employee development.In fact my reading said that the smart companies are continuing if not increasing their training related expenditure as they realize its only a matter of time after which things would return back to normalcy.Its that phase of the business cycle where you continue with the training and development plan which otherwise is cut short as preferance is given to other functional areas of management which are related with the departments considered to be the revenue spinners.
Smart companies therefore nurture and groom their soldiers(read employees) during the period of slowdown, so that they can make the right tactical moves by becoming battle ready, once the skies clear up in the economical landscape.

Customizing my training inputs in Dubai

Training corporate executives the subject "Managing Market" in November 2008, I realized the importance of localizing the training content, which compelled me to have a GLOCAL-Global inputs with a local touch.As the executives were working with leading companies from the UAE representing sectors like hospitality, real estate, travel and tourism, aviation, banks, financial services my approach of quoting examples of corporates from the UAE like Emmar, Tamweel, Emirates Airlines, Burj-Al-Arab, Jumeriya Hotels and Resorts, DFC,to name a along with the corporations from Abu Dhabi like Aldaar went a long way in making the trainees understand the concepts of Managing Markets.The response/queries emanating from the trainees mind were focussed around the sectors/companies and their impact due to the global financial crisis and thats precisely the reason why I retorted back by explaining their own organziations, the ones they are familiar with, with those of global giants like Microsoft, Cisco, Ford, Walmart,Carrefour, KLM to name a few.
Its important for a trainer to know the demographic, psychographic and behavioural status of his trainees and research around for information on the similar lines so that his academic delivery is in line with the trainees understanding.
I should admit it was a symbiotic process of knowledge enhancement as I learnt a lot along with my set of trainees. Moreover, I realized the importance of conducting a comprehensive study through primary and secondary in a new territory-be it a district, county, state or even nation as all are different in their own way, and a smart trainer can easily pick training threads from these experiences which would help in delivering need based training.

Nov. 08 Training Experiences in the Gulf

My training experience in Dubai while training professionals from different sectors representing different ethnicity made it very clear, that the trainers job to reinforce the training deliverables has to follow a blend of different training techniques and methodologies.My approach was quite simply, as I was training people from more than one nationalities, I tried to give illustrations from their own countries apart from the global examples and few from UAE-Dubai and UAE.In most of the cases english being the second language, the trainees found it difficult to handle the stuff, I therefore emphatized to the level of the poorest learner.My models of training here in the gulf during my last five visits has added to my training repertoire.