We all have read and heard about multicultural crews in many places and companies around the world, different Human Resources Specialists and Operational Equipment are dealing with such as new environment and co-working characteristics, my reflection today is about the effects of multicultural conditions but not when an overseas route is operated by a crew composed by different nation pilots or about the importance of the standard communication procedures and the benefits of the SOP when working with multicultural crews.
What about multicultural training? What about when the trainer or trainee are culturally different? if they came from different cultures or are formed at different times, maybe the teacher or trainer is considerably older than their pupils, maybe the trainees are from the military, what about a millennial being trained by a baby boomer? It´s something to consider when dealing with a procedure as violent or dynamic as this, the pilot qualification on a entire new equipment.
Most of the time the instructor is making his/her best effort, no doubt of that, but the result will be around their capacity and understanding of the process and their specific characteristics, but there will be ingredients beyond their control, are the pupils really understanding what I said?, are they asking me all their doubts?, most of the time the process designers and the time invested on this process will be really important on their conclusion. It’s not the same to train pilots with previous experience or when they are coming to his/her first job only to mention one of several edges to take into consideration in this topic.
Next, some considerations that can help us to deal with a training process or maybe to improve in some way the technic we were using or considering.
- Maybe the process is taking place between pilots coming from South America and the trainer is from… a culture like Asia or the Middle East. There is a study made by Dr. Geert Hofstede that explain about multicultural differences considering a 6-D Model of National Culture, it´s important to know that in many cases the participants origin can take a decisive role in the way a student is expecting to receive the information or understand the process, the same way if we talk about the instructor.
- Another point to take into consideration is the age, most of the time we train as we were trained in the past, of course, it is the only way we know to deal with this task, but what if when we were trained, at this memorable time, we were adolescents or young students in the flight school without experience? This is the same way we must train a pilot with a hundred or thousand flight hours on their bag? Most of the Pedagogical techniques that worked for us in the past aren’t sufficient considering the actual scenario where Andragogy explains better the way and aspects that certainly can close the distance or reduce the time that we will need to take to reach a good performance, good enough to deal with a proficiency check all over the world.
We must consider as instructors and also as students that perhaps the process we are about to start has deficiencies, that we must deal with based on the actual participants, patience, study, and tolerance are ingredients that certainly can help us to oil the machine that represents the process of forming, training and rating new pilots in an ever more connected world.
Ramiro Fuentes 