After many years doing a face to face monthly training to installers from all over the world about wet pour rubber surfacing I really miss these sessions lasting two or three days, ending with a nice dinner with all participants in a good restaurant and then a humble diploma ceremony.
I must confess that what I miss the most is the contact with my colleagues and people from different countries from whom I also learned a lot of techniques and tricks during these training sessions, where I was supposed to be the teacher.
Then at the first quarter of last year the COVID pandemic came into our lives and has changed most of our personal and professional lives and activities for more than a year now and it looks like this will continue for a few more months.
Our day to day has become a succession of video meetings, webinars and training courses through Zoom, Teams, Cisco Webex, Google Meet, Skype, Blue Jeans, and a lot of other IT tools that you didn’t know existed.
This has many advantages in terms of reducing trips, flights, time at the airports and the costs associated with them, and the truth is that for theoretical training and product introduction or daily internal or external meetings the results are amazingly good. I am sure we will continue taking advantage of these IT tools that we now nearly master.
I may start the day in my home office, with a prospect or customer in Australia or Malaysia, one hour later I may be somewhere in Middle East or Europe, move around Europe and Middle East during the morning and in the afternoon meet or start a webinar with people in USA, Canada or different Latin America Countries.
Of course I had to buy a good microphone, light systems, a green screen, an stabilizing gimbal for my iPhone, broadcasting – streaming software a Stream Deck, and several other things I did not know they existed either. Maybe I can become a YouTuber when I retire with all this stuff.
However, when it comes to practical training in the use of wet pour materials, machines and tools, nothing can replace face-to-face training. The student must be able to touch materials and tools with their hands and get the feeling that can only be obtained in real life manual work.
We will continue organising some training webinars during the next few months but I am looking forward to resuming travel, face to face training sessions, meetings with customers and gatherings at commercial fairs. See you, hopefully at the next FSB in Cologne or the NRPA Conference in Nashville.
In the meantime, fortunately, visits to job sites in progress allow us to keep in touch with our installers and customers and learn a few new things every day.
Dinners at restaurants are still on hold near everywhere. Also looking forward for this.
Take care and keep safe.
Rubberman Blog 