Recently in training Category

Term is starting for Mandarin evening classes and I had better dust off last year's work and see if any of it is still lodged in my long-term memory. Of the class of eight, only two of us decided to sit, and happily pass, the GCSE exam at the end of last term.

My two speeches on "My holiday in California" and "My favourite sports" (this latter a tissue of lies), which I rehearsed diligently for weeks and thought would be stuck in my brain till my dying day, are now but a distant memory. My insights into why Wayne Rooney is a top footballer are sadly lost to posterity.

Watching the table tennis team of the People's Republic of China at the London 2012 Olympics, the Blog's daughter asked if ping pong started in China. I'm not sure if it did, I told her, but I certainly said it did in my GCSE speech for the oral exam. It was a great eye-opener to learn from the teacher that, "it doesn't have to be true." It is so much easier to give a presentation if the facts don't have to be true.

Since I now have half a GCSE in Mandarin, I change my LinkedIn profile to "Mandarin - Limited Proficiency."

From time to time, my ICIS Asian colleagues ask how the Mandarin is coming along. I tell them about my holidays and they look at me blankly. I think it will be a long time till we can talk about petrochemical markets.

Watching horse-racing with my mother on Saturday, I heard a great quote which I was sure our trainers at ICIS training would love.

"Two weeks ago I felt I couldn't train ivy up a wall," said racehorse trainer Venetia Williams, who was the trainer of the winning horse Ciceron in the 3.45 at Sandown Park, after her stables had had a long run of bad form.

London is back in favour as an ICIS Training venue, with delegates at this week's seminars noting how cheap they were finding the trip, not to mention the pre-Xmas shopping, especially those of them exchanging Swiss francs. The five days of training seminars at the new location at County Hall are still in progress, but the Blog was speaking on just two of the days and is already back in the office.

Delegates were very multinational - from all over Europe plus the Middle East and Nigeria. They had some interesting questions about European contract prices, particularly the concept of the single number contract reference price, which since last week now embraces styrene too.

ICIS Training has been all round the world this month. In the last two weeks, the trainers have been in South Africa and Dubai, and Roland has sent the Blog these photos today which give a bit of the flavour of the individual events.

Photos: 1 and 2 Petchems Training in South Africa, 3 Baseoils Training in Dubai.

We are back in Budapest for ICIS Training. It is barely a year since we were here for EPCA 2010, and this time the training is in the Marriott Hotel in a big airy room overlooking the Danube and across the river up the hill to Buda. It is by far the best view we have ever had from the training room itself - although the hotel view of Table Mountain when we took ICIS Training to Capetown was pretty good too.

Our students in Budapest are from petchem companies in 10 different countries including Turkey, Ukraine, Russia and the Netherlands. The three days pass in a flash, everyone puts on lots of weight, and we agree that Budapest will have a regular slot on the training calendar.

Out of season, the hotel is empty, service is over-the-top attentive, and outside it is chilly but sunny. The hotel's lunch buffet includes four types of strudel (curd cheese, cherry, poppyseed and apple). What more can you say?

Our Hungarian reporter Janos recommends a great restaurant on the Buda side of the river, and we enjoy it so much we go back on two evenings. Roll on EPCA 2012 in Budapest.

Photos

1 ICIS Training in Marriott Budapest

2 View from the window of training room

3 A delegate consults Nigel after Day One

Petri Mäkelä, formerly with Oy Finnco Trading and Nizhex Scandinavia, has joined Fred Holmberg & Co Oy, he informed the Blog on Wednesday.

Mäkelä will be based at the office in Hamina, Finland.

Mäkelä and Fred Holmberg are old companions from their days on styrene at Nizhex.

The Blog had the pleasure of catching up with Fred and his son Max at EPCA in Berlin, where Max revealed that he was an alumnus of ICIS Training in Amsterdam this year.

The training team knows no bounds, and now the traditional "Introduction to Petrochemicals" course is being delivered in Mandarin by our Shanghai, Guangzhou, Mumbai and Singapore-based trainers.

The first Chinese language course took place in Shanghai at the Interconti Pudong last week. The photo shows a group of delegates with Liu Xin and Roland (both Singapore) (far left) and Malini Hariharan (Mumbai), Ken Yin and Chris Qi (both Shanghai) (far right, front row.)

I embellished my presentation to the Houston editorial team this week with a short video clip that I'd shot in the London office on Tuesday. It was a two-minute clip of my colleague Helena, who is a markets reporter in the ICIS London team, talking to me about some creative refinements she had made to her reports. It was a really effective reworking of what I was trying to say, and worked like a product endorsement: "If you don't believe me, listen to what someone else has to say ..."

Just two minutes of listening to her talking off the cuff, just sitting at her desk, was worth half an hour of listening to me.

I'm quite excited about the prospects for using video clips of editors talking in internal training and progress updates. It is one way round the whole "Death by Powerpoint" that regular conference-goers are prone to.

The only thing worse than travelling with someone who insists on carrying a full-scale projector around the world is having to carry the projector yourself. The Blog has had its patience tested while waiting for the ICIS training projector to cool down, or waiting for the projector to pass through security.

On one trip (Frankfurt, I think), the projector's guardian, Peter T was taken away by a security guard to have the projector sponged down for explosives.

So LG's new HX300G, the "world's most powerful projector", a tiny 16 cm wide and 6 cm deep, struck the Blog as a welcome addition to the travelling baggage of ICIS training.

You can simply connect a USB stick and play a presentation straight from it, wherever you may be in the darkest corners of the world. According to the techie review in the free shortlist.com magazine I picked up on the train, it has a 30,000-hour lifespan, meaning that you can leave it on for 10 hours a day, five days a week, and it would still last more than 10 years. The perfect present for someone who doesn't trust hotel projectors, or at least doesn't want to pay the hundreds of euros which hotels charge for projector hire.

See also:

    Perfect Chemical Presents No 4 - Periodic Table Tie    

    Perfect Chemical Presents No 3 - Periodic Table Mug      

    Perfect Chemical Presents No 2 - the Mobile Phone Jam Device    

    Perfect Chemical Presents No 1 - the Borat Swimsuit 

(photo: LGblog)

From four days of ICIS training in London, some good photos of the speakers and delegates have reached the Blog. Here are a few, and the full 20 will be posted on Monday on the ICIS training website.