The talent gap in training: addressing the limited pool of specialized soft skills and behavioral trainers at Scholastica/SPEED

Abstract

In this internship report I discuss an immediate working crisis in SPEED which is a sister concern under Scholastica and the Ascent Group: lack of training in specialized soft skills and behavioral trainers. As requests rose concerning leadership, communication, and emotional intelligence training in Bangladesh, SPEED has turned out to be an essential part of the training environment. Nevertheless, its reliance on a few high-quality trainers has led to its inability to vary the content of its sessions, bottlenecks in schedules, and burnout. Guided by a qualitative research framework, this report uses semi-structured interviews with four careers who have comprehensively been involved in the training, operation and strategy at SPEED. It is also a reflection of the experiences that I was able to collect during my internship with the company on training organization and material creation lasting three months. Among the most essential findings, there are deficient official systems of trainer onboarding, excessive dependence on just several reliable trainers, and institutional inability to nurture new facilitators. Such restrictions limit the scalability of SPEED, involvement of participants, and creativity of content delivery. The report suggests a systematic Trainer Incubation Program such as mentorship program, rubrics of performance and digital tracking systems to enhance the capacity of the organization. It also recommends the use of in-house interns and junior officers who would serve as potential facilitators to minimize the risk and maximize the resilience of the organization. Owing to the shortage of trainers, one way through which SPEED can optimize its training provision and meet the increasing demand in the market is through alleviating the shortage of trainers