Peter - meet Paulette. Namesake of The Paulette Principle
Dr. Laurence Johnston Peter (September 16, 1919 – January 12, 1990) was an educator and "hierarchiologist", best known to the general public for the formulation of the Peter Principle.
He became widely famous in 1968, on the publication of The Peter Principle, in which he states: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence ... in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties ... Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence."
The Peter Principle became one of the most profound principles of management from the University of Southern California.(fromWikipedia)
Peter, we'd like you to meet Paulette. Paulette is Peter's cousin. The Paulette Principle (coined by The Training Doctor, circa 1991) states "Most people who are good at what they do, are terrible at training others to do the same." Some of the sub-principles associated with The Paulette Principle are:
Just because someone is good at what they do, doesn't mean they can explain it to others.
Just because someone is good at what they do, doesn't mean they even KNOW exactly what they are doing.
Most people who are really good at what they do, can't remember what it was like to be "new" and skip over very basic, crucial, introductory information.
Most people who are really good at what they do, know too much and fill their trainees heads with lots of cool stories and fascinating asides that are exciting (for the SME) to talk about, but leave the learner confused about what is the crucial information to know and what is "nice to know."
Example: An individual, who was involved in helping to create a proprietary software product for his company, then became the trainer of the field service representatives who were charged with installing and customizing their software at the client's sites. Within the first 45 minutes of class the Subject Matter Expert / Trainer explained the difference between a comma-delimited file and a non-comma-delimited file and explained how the tables worked behind the scenes to manipulate the data. What the trainees really need to know was, "What is the appropriate format for entering data in to the system? Do you put commas between items or not?" The class went on for 4 more days and the trainees were bombarded with much more 'extraneous' information.
Needless to say - no one was able to pass the test at the end of the training.