Recently, 90 trainers took to the roads of South Africa in their VW Caddys, armed not only with Gidani Lottery training terminals but also laptops, laminators, printers and cameras.

These 90 trainers not only have to train approximately 30 000 learners from 8 000 retailers in 92 venues across the country, in four weeks, on how to operate the new Lottery terminals, but they also have to do a whole lot of back office admin.

When they are out there, for each training session that takes place, they have to register the learners, creat electronic registers that link back to a database, take digital photos of the learners, create ID cards with the photos, print and laminate the ID cards and save that info so that it can also be linked back to a main frame data base, print certificates and burn back up CDs.

Now that sounds relatively easy to those of us who work with technology daily. Many of our trainers however have never had the privilege of working on a computer…..

And so their training began……in approx 6 hours of real learning time they had to learn how to do the above!!!

So, we created a step by step Geeks Guide to Technology, for easy reference and then began the practical training at the train the trainers conference.

I will never forget that first day of training…..the room was filled with electronic equipment connected by numerous powercables, USB cables and extension cords leading off everywhere. The new lotto trainers eyes were as big as saucepans when they saw all this stuff and the room was filled with silent intrepidation.

We made it clear at that point that no one in the room is to be percieved as stupid and there is no such thing as a stupid question, with regards to their working with the technology - and we made it clear that everyone has different levels of knowledge related to their exposure and experience with technology. So, those who did not even know where to switch the laptop on, were made to feel comfortable.

I have never been so proud of so many people at once….the cropping, dropping and dragging of photos was excrutiatingly frustrating for many, who have never had the opportunity to develop the fine motor skills necessary when using a mouse, to put a cursor on a grab point and crop a picture or left click and drag at the same time.

Many have never owned a camera - let alone a digital camera, which they must now take hundreds of pictures of learners with, download the images onto their laptops and then open each photo, crop it and drag it onto an ID template.

Logistically, I never dreamed that this part of the project would be so huge…we bought 90 laptops, 45 printers, 45 laminators, 45 digital cameras and 45 proximas - we loaded all the software necessary onto all the laptops, creating easy short cuts, and loaded the necessary templates (in numerous places on the laptop in case a template got altered or corrupted) and then we started to buy all the stationary necessary to create ID cards etc. So we bought everthing in numbers of 33 000 - lamination pouches, ID clips, sticky labels…and so the list goes on and on…(sorry if anyone else needs to buy any of this stuff - we bought the suppliers in South Africa out of these materials!!!), our shopping spree filled a warehouse - you get the picture!! All of this also had to be divided up and distributed amongst the trainers, as well as electronic equipment being serialised before being handed out - this created another piece of logistics bigger than anticipated…what a learning curve!!!

So if you are out on the roads of South Africa and you see a white VW caddy - give them a friendly wave - it could be the Gidani Lottery trainers, who have had the courage to empower and arm themselves with skills and technical knowledge that many might shy away from!!