trainer

8 Good things I’ve learned from bad computer-based training

/ Melanie Marttila / 2 Comments

So … we were provided this computer-based training (CBT) product to help roll out what may appear on the surface to be a fairly minor change, but turns out to be quite a complicated change that has an impact of several aspects of the work our front-line and processing staff perform.

The intent was to send the product and its accompanying Job Aid out to all staff, and let them have at.  There would, of course, be a policy brief released and online tools to help with the adjustment.

At first blush, the CBT looked great: interactive, with exercises and self-assessment tools …  That was before anyone actually tried to work through it.  Early on in the process, when it had already been decided that the CBT would be insufficient for our needs (thank goodness) I and several of my colleagues had a chance to go through the CBT.

I had no problem, but I’m tech savvy, I know how these things are generally designed, and I also play with things.  I click in apparently inappropriate places.  I muck about until I figure out how something ticks, and then I git ‘er done 🙂

The first problem was the site onto which the CBT was loaded.  It wasn’t particularly user friendly and several people couldn’t figure out whether they needed to log in, set up a new account, or reset their passwords.  The system was a little glitchy too, and offered errors when the CBT was accessed, requiring a re-log.

After I helped everyone get logged in and set up, I waited for the reviews.  This is what we discovered:

  1. Though pretty, the CBT was very much of the “clicky-clicky, bling-bling” species that Cammy Bean reviles.  Read about it on her blog.  Go on, I’ll wait.
  2. There were no clear and easily accessible instructions to inform learners what they needed to do on any given page (e.g. you have a picture of a luggage rack on the screen … and … ?).
  3. Navigation was accomplished through varied small or awkwardly-positioned cues.
  4. Exercises and tests contained no clear instructions, nor any mention of the purpose of the activity or how it would apply to the learner’s work.
  5. When working through examples, the learner can not navigate back to the scenario page and so has to write everything down and work it out by hand, or muddle through on a memory and a guess.
  6. All the assessments were self-assessments.  How could anyone determine if learning had taken place?
  7. The CBT was filled with acronyms, but no definitions.
  8. There were errors in the examples.

Turn all these negatives on their heads, and you have 8 take-aways for elearning.  See how that works?

When the CBT was given to staff, many of them were so frustrated with the experience, they stuck to (and got more out of) reading the print material.

Ultimately, the CBT was about how to get through the CBT, and the real learning was lost.

Admittedly, we don’t have the time to correct the existing CBT, or to develop a new product.  As flawed as it is, it’s what we have to use.

Next time, though, I hope the development team keeps a few things in mind:

  1. The importance of bringing subject matter experts (SMEs) who have some course design experience and technical aptitude into the fold. There are a few of us out there.  Use your networks and resources wisely!  Even if I had the time, I couldn’t redesign the CBT: I don’t have a license for the tool used to create it, or anything similar.
  2. Design for how people think.  This means keeping the end-user in mind.  It has to be a product that both your mother and your ten-year-old nephew could navigate through equally easily.  This means beta-testing on a group of your target audience and taking their criticisms seriously.
  3. Assessment is not just for the learner, it’s for team leaders and the advisors who are going to have to answer all the questions your learners have after the CBT experience.  It’s also for trainers, course designers, and IT, so they can figure out how to make a better product next time.

In the end, the CBT has to facilitate learning, support retention, and help the learner apply the knowledge when he or she returns to work.

Oh, if I were king of my little learning world 🙂  And yes, I’m a woman and I want to be king.  Got a problem with that, do ya?  I didn’t think so 😉

How have the best-laid plans of upper management and IT gone awry for you?  Did you tuck any lessons away for future application?  Have you learned good things from a bad CBT?

The Learning Mutt is signing off for another week.

Learning about learning coordination

/ Melanie Marttila / 3 Comments

There’s no guidebook or manual for what I do.  There’s no course that can teach me how to foresee the rough beast that slouches toward me, defend against it, or turn it away.

My title is training coordinator, and the main thrust of my job is to plan the year’s training, and try to keep everything within budget.  Along with that came a whole set of tasks that I was neither familiar nor comfortable with.

Still, I learned, I dealt, and I made the best of it.

My first big test was to plan the year’s training.  The skeleton was there, but surgery was required.  A titanium joint here, a transplanted bone there, the odd amputation and prosthesis, and voila: a training plan.  Call me Frankenstein.

Then I had to cost it all out given a reduced budget.

I did well though, made it through my first all-day meeting via conference call … for a moment there, I thought I understood what my job was all about.

I think I have to have another look at my job description.  There must be a clause in there somewhere that says “and all other duties as required.”  Or maybe the key phrase is “must tolerate ambiguity.”

I can do most of what’s been asked of me.  I can make pretty tables and Excel worksheets.  I can write proposals, and while my manager rewrites most of what I submit, that’s part of his job.  I haven’t quite learned to cater to my new audience yet.  Give me a defined task, and I’ll make it happen.  It’s all the little stuff that I wasn’t expecting that’s getting to me.  It’s all the chaos.  For a creative person, I don’t do chaos well …

It’s all the last-minute training that no one knows about until a week before it has to be delivered.  Add to that the reassignment of the training team to other duties (so no one to deliver the training) and the necessity of training nearly all the processing staff in the province, and you have a narsty beast indeed.

Though there’s a whole slew of other prioritized work that I need to get done, I’m stuck in scheduling hell.  Nearly 600 staff over 40 sessions, plus independent study groups.  My head spun with that alone, but then I was asked to co-facilitate 6 of the sessions.  Hey, I’m a trainer.  It’s what I did for 3 years.  I can hack it.

And then …  I was asked to do the invitations for all the sessions, and set up the sessions in WebEx because the trainers we recruited weren’t familiar with the technology.  It wasn’t what they signed up for, which is understandable.  They have their own overflowing workloads to deal with too.  Plus, each set of invitations I sent out returned half a dozen changes to the schedule. That is a lot of work for one person.  And it’s not over yet.

Once again, I’m managing.  I’m making it happen.  I’ve even made some suggestions in the event something like this happens in the future (which I think is inevitable).

Regardless what work they may have been assigned to, the best people to handle training is the training team.  They know the technology.  They’re experienced trainers.  They can set up their own sessions and create and send out their own invitations. If I was able to work with them, this training would have gone off without a hitch.  Well there’s still the schedule to consider, but I think that might be a problem under any circumstances (more on this in a moment).

With a team of 6, we could have rotated them through the sessions, so they still could have dedicated most of their time to their reassigned duties, the work would have been distributed, and everyone would have gotten what they needed to out of the deal … with a little compromise.

Failing that plan of action, we have to ensure that anyone recruited to deliver training will be able to fulfill all the duties that the training entails, such as setting up WebEx sessions and doing their own invitations.

I’ve figured out what to do about the schedule too.  Now this was my fault, because I didn’t think of asking for some key information that it turned out I needed.  Another learning experience.  That too, is on the books for “next time.”

For now, things are slowly starting to level out.  It’s still chaos, but it’s an organized kind of chaos.  The rough and slouching beast sits beside my desk, growing only occasionally, and I think we’ll all come out of this intact.  

This may sound like a blog-of-complaint, but I’m trying to keep this as a statement of facts rather than an indictment.  I’ll be fine.  These are just growing pains.  I’m essentially optimistic.  This has just been a heck of a couple of weeks.  It’s hard not to be overwhelmed when you’re … well, overwhelmed.

Had a trial by fire?  What did your rough beast look like?  Were you able to figure out a way to make things work?  Success stories welcome 🙂

I’m the Learning Mutt, circling three times and curling up for a nice nap.

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A course in course design :)

/ Melanie Marttila

During my undergraduate years, I enrolled in a class that allowed me to teach the composition portion of the first year English survey course.  Periodic tutorials provided instruction in pedagogy and marking standardization session ensured that all of us in the program were marking essays neither too harshly, nor too kindly.  I also tutored in the writing centre and received attended an information session on the specific learning needs of native students.  I did this for two years.

When I started my graduate degree, I, like many grad students, taught the first year composition course.  Essentially, there was an orientation lecture, we were given our texts, and the rest of it was up to us. I used what I’d learned during my undergraduate degree, but really, I shot from the hip.

When I learned that an optional course called “The Theory of University Teaching” was offered, I signed up right away.  A lot of what I learned at that point was muddled with all the other courses I was enrolled in, the teaching, and my ongoing creative writing project.  I taught that course for two years as well.

Most of what I learned about course design from those days was focused on university teaching.  Most of what stuck with me was adult learning theory, creating syllabi, and the importance of learning outcomes.

While I’ve put together some creative writing workshops and helped a friend, who was a high school teacher, work on her redesign of her Writers’ Craft course, I didn’t start writing courses myself until last year.

I generally run on instinct.  I think about what I’d need to know if I was the learner, and go from there.  Systems training is easier.  There’s a logical progression to the course provided by the structure of the program: Basic navigation > menus > screens > fields > inputs.  It can be boring, but I do my best not to turn into a computer in the process.

My team receiving our awards 🙂

The SMART Board course for which I receved a Service Excellence award was essentially systems training, as were the SharePoint videos I produced.

I also helped to cobble together a course on elearning design, not having a clear idea of what I was doing.

The last course design project I worked on was not writing from scratch, but rewriting a course that was originally designed as a self-instructional module.  The new venue was in-class, using with participant centered methodologies.  It may seem like a step backward in a world where virtual training is king, but it was what our participants wanted.

The response to this course tweak has been positive, though further revision has been recommended.

My writerly goodness tends to emerge in the process of course writing.  I like metaphors; creating stories and frameworks for the training to play out within.  I like to play.  I try to be clever, but it was never one of my strengths.  In the end, I’ve learned by doing and will continue to do so.

And I’ve learned by learning.  Last fall, I attended two courses, the first on participant centered training (see last week’s post, linked below) and the second on participant centered course design.  The courses were only a month apart, and there was some concern that I wouldn’t have time to assimilate the knowledge from the first before being thrown into the second.  I found the opposite to be true: the second course reinforced the learning from the first and expanded it in new directions.

Some of the things I’ve learned:

  • Allow the participants to take control of their learning;
  • Include sample questions;
  • Always include the purpose of an exercise or activity;
  • Include proper learning points for a debrief;
  • Link! (current topic to last topic; current topic to next topic; learning to application on the job; to value added pieces, etc.)
  • Assess seven ways from Sunday 🙂 and
  • Provide lots of opportunities for skills transfer and application.

I’m still missing a few bits and pieces, but I’m sure they’ll all fall into place as time goes on.  I’m addicted to learning, you see.  I can’t stop.  I learn however I can, whenever I can: reading, Webinars, informal learning …

Most recently, my employer has made available a suite of elearning courses from a third party provider.  I have my licence until the end of the year and have already completed the Change Management and mapped out enough elearning to keep my busy if I ever have a moment to spare 🙂

As I develop my platform, slowly and steadily, more opportunities will reveal themselves.  I still have a number of in-class courses I’d like to take at work, and I’m just beginning to figure out what books I want to read on the subject.

It’s going to be a great adventure.

Any gems to share about your own adventures in course design?

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Participant Centered Training and Personal Knowledge Management

/ Melanie Marttila / 1 Comment

Bob Pike is responsible for introducing the concept of participant centered training (PCT).  He’s been in the training industry since 1969 (the year I was born, incidentally), but focused on PCT since 1979.  Needless to say, PCT is not a new idea.

Traditionally, corporate training has been conducted by a “talking head,” a subject matter expert, who imparts her or his wisdom to waiting students.  The assumption of this kind of training is that the students are sponge-like, highly motivated, and that they will somehow find a way to absorb what the trainer is saying, or to mimic the trainer’s behaviours, and be able to magically transform that information into the performance their employer desires.  But how does the average learner, who may or may not be sponge-like, accomplish this feat?  That’s the problem.

PCT turns that paradigm on its head.  The trainer is merely present to elicit the desired knowledge from the learners, to encourage the appropriate behaviours, and to facilitate the process of discovery that will lead the learners to exhibit the desired performance in the workplace.  It’s no longer about having all the answers, but about being able to help the learners, now active participants in their own learning, find the answers for themselves.

Not the “sage on the stage.” Instead, be the “guide on the side.”

Primarily, PCT is a classroom methodology, and that is how it’s often taught, but once learned, the principles can be applied to any kind of training.  If you can design the right kinds of activities and ask the right kinds of questions, it’s still possible to implement PCT online in synchronous courses, or even online, asynchronously.

It’s the facilitation (or the framework) that’s the key.

I took an introductory course to PCT delivery in 2009 and in September of 2011, took the next course on my way to training certification within my organization.  There’s a lot more to PCT than what I’ve mentioned here, but that’s the key learning behind PCT.  How the trainer, or designer, accomplishes it has been the subject of books, academic papers, and the foundation of many a training business.

It could also be the innovative trainer’s ticket …

So check it out.

Some resources for you:

I’m a novice at this whole training gig and I know I have much farther to go.

Case in point: Harold Jarche.  The man has seriously been blowing my mind in the last weeks with his posts on his blog: Life in perpetual beta.  I cannot articulate the awesome right now.

Just go read his blog.  Follow it.  Become a PKM disciple 🙂  What’s PKM, you ask?  That would be personal knowledge management.

PKM takes PCT and turns that paradigm on its head 🙂  The learner is ultimately and intimately in control of their own learning and in many ways takes facilitation out of the equation altogether.  As a newbie trainer it freaks me out a bit, but PKM is the way I prefer to learn, through networks and connections, and as an addicted learner, I’m a fan.

Acronyms abound!  So what do you think?  PCT or PKM?  A liitle from column A and a little from column B?  Does it depend on the learning situation?  Can PCT be a stepping stone on the way to PKM?  Tell me what you think.

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More adventures in SharePoint

/ Melanie Marttila

Last week, I took a bit of a departure from my learning journey to tell you the bitter and the sweet of a recent event in my day-job professional life.

Now we’ll get back to what was possibly the best year of my training life.

Even as I was finishing up with the elearning course, the drive was on to develop our department’s SharePoint site.  It grew from a single team site, to a site collection.  This was for our team.  A second site collection was created as a training centre for staff, and because of my tinkering, I became head designer.

So I had to set up both site collections, and develop a training product to introduce, or reintroduce my colleagues to SharePoint.  There was another survey involved as well, and many service requests to IT.  In my business, no one outside of IT can be a site owner.  The best we can do is designer.

So I spent the better part of a month, dividing my time between writing the participants’ guide and workbook, developing the scripts for the accompanying videos, and the PowerPoint slides on one hand, and developing the two site collections on the other.

I created custom lists, manipulated content types to insert templates into document library menus, put together a professional development site for my team where I promoted the learning blogs I followed, the Webinars I participated in, the books I read, and so forth.

It was about this time that I wrote my exam for the courseware writer position.

I spent two days recording and re-recording the videos.  They were still too long, but the deadline arrived, and I didn’t have the time to devote any more to the project.

In the wake of the training and the survey, several more amendments to the SharePoint site were suggested.  At the time, my colleague Laura was working on another project, putting together a Web page for our department on the company Intranet.  The Web page on our corporate site was to point to the staff training centre SharePoint site collection.  Unfortunately, there were few things we could legitimately control on the Web page, so the SharePoint sites were in jeopardy of languishing …

Until my manager decided that our SharePoint could be our de facto Intranet site.

Then began a new drive to totally redesign the training centre SharePoint.  Away went most of the Quick Launch links to the lists and libraries, away went the “out of the box” home page with its announcements and links, replaced by content editor Web parts.  I used my limited skills in image manipulation to create banners, and wiki libraries to provide a Web page-like interface for staff to access our training products and documentation.

At that time, I had three weeks to finish that bit of miracle before I had a couple of days leave, and then a week of training to attend out of town.  This was also when I submitted my application for the consultant position. If it doesn’t rain, it pours!

A marathon final day of tweaking brought that phase of the project to a close.

Were there more adventures in SharePoint yet to come? You bet 🙂  But not for a while.

This was one of the most demanding projects I’ve worked on, but I enjoyed it immensely.  I love being master of my own domain and that’s exactly what this was.

Have your interests fed into a project like this?  One that grew until you hardly thought you could complete it?  What happened?  Did you pull a rabbit out of your hat?  I bet you did!

Tell me about it … Seriously 🙂

 

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The bitter and the sweet

/ Melanie Marttila / 2 Comments

I promised last week that I would post about a bittersweet experience I’ve had at work.  As with anything I write on Writerly Goodness, it’s a bit of a story 🙂

I’ve written previously about how I became a trainer and course designer.  All I’ll add to that now is that I love my job and I honestly thought I’d found my home.  I had no interest in leaving.

Still, the wisdom at work is that if you see a job-posting that you’d be interested in, apply for it.  If nothing else, you get the experience of going through an “assessment process” and you get to find out if others in the organization see value in what you do.

In 2010, I’d missed out on a couple of plum postings, both times because I was out on the road training, and didn’t have my resume, transcripts, or copies of my degrees with me.  All would have been required.  Ah well, I thought, this might be the universe telling me that I’m right (for a change).  I’m happy where I am and I shouldn’t mess with it.

In April of 2011, I saw a posting for a courseware writer.  At this point, my training world-view was just beginning to be expanded with techie tools, and free Webinars, and all that good stuff.  Even then, I knew that course writing was a direction I’d love to go in.  So I applied.

One thing I have to tell you about assessment processes at my employer is that they are long.  Sometimes a year can pass before you hear anything back.  I was content to wait though.  So many other things were happening in my life at the time, I probably couldn’t have done testing, interviews, or myself, justice.

In July, I received a notice: I’d made it past the screening and would be writing an exam.

So I did.

Then in September, in the midst of another crazy time at work, I saw a posting for a consultant.  My position is called an advisor.  That’s where training falls in our organization, and consultant would be a step up.  The call was broad, across business lines and all over the province.  I thought, what the heck, let’s give it a try, not even thinking that I would be successful.

That testing was in October, a fairly quick turnaround for my employer, and the test was followed by a phone interview in November.  The results were to be released by the end of the calendar year.

I still hadn’t heard anything about the course writer process, and as the possibility that I could become a consultant became more and more real, I started to get concerned.  By that time, I was more convinced than ever that I was where I was meant to be, career-wise.  Did I want to become a consultant?  Would I like it?  I had no idea.

The promise of a swift assessment was fulfilled and I made the pool of candidates along with another colleague.

Then things at work began to get tense and uncomfortable.  My colleagues and I were delegated to processing for three months and all training activities were cancelled.  Employees were being culled by virtue of the non-renewal of their contracts.  Restructuring, a process that is on-going and painful, had started in earnest and people were relocating, changing business lines, and generally doing whatever they could to preserve their jobs.

I didn’t expect anything to result of the consultant pool.  There was no budget for hiring, so why should I expect anything?

Slowly, things began to even out.  My team returned to training, and the initiative that had been postponed by our return to processing.  My manager announced that she was pregnant and going on maternity leave effective June first.

And when I least expected it, I got the call.

Today was my first official day as Acting Training Coordinator (a position that falls within the consultant role) and with luck, I’ll get to hang onto it until March 31, 2013.  Eeps!

The good things:

  • New challenges
  • Steep learning curve (call me masochistic, but I thrive on this stuff)
  • Acting pay (had to say it)
  • A chance to find out if I like it
  • A chance to find out if I’m good at it

The bad things:

  • Leaving my team (I heart them so much!)
  • Fear of failure (and it’s not a wee thing)
  • Not training anymore (my last gig was last week—sadness)
  • Having to off-load all my work and special projects on my team mates
  • More responsibility and pressure (I have a budget to manage—eek!)

So there you are: my bittersweet rhapsody 🙂  It’s more sweet than bitter, to be sure.  I’m doing the snoopy 🙂

I’m celebrating tomorrow when I receive my Silver award with some of my team mates.  That was for the SMART Board project.  It looks like it might get a revamp this year and I may get to train again.  Happiness is just waiting to be found.

Do you have a success story that presents as a mixed bag?

Learning elearning, the hard way :)

/ Melanie Marttila

Last time, on Breaking open the mind: I participated in my first real working group.

In March of 2011, my team received a gift: our first non-acting manager in years!  We’d gone through four in the past year alone and it was hell.  The manager that we started the year out with had been our acting manager for a while.  He knew the team and what we needed, but then he moved onto another position.  Then, we had a manager for all of three weeks before she also took on another position.

Finally, there were two other acting managers who, while well-meaning and perfectly competent, really didn’t feel comfortable in the role for the training team.  The manager that we’d had for such a short time the summer previous was successful in a competition and returned as our manager, but this time permanently.

So, a new manager, and a new fiscal year threw things into high gear.  Our budget was restricted.  No overtime, and certainly no money for travel.  We had to start looking at alternatives to in-class, instructor-led training if we wanted to be able to continue and continue to be relevant.

Thus working groups evolved for the SMART Board and WebEx, our two main tools that could be used to deliver virtual training, either synchronously (together), or asynchronously (independently).  To follow up those two courses was to be a third, regarding elearning design and the conversion of in-class course materials to online or virtual vehicles.

Though I was considered the go to person with regard to the SMART Board, I couldn’t legitimately volunteer for any of the working groups.  My father had recently passed away, and I had asked for several weeks of leave.  I wouldn’t even be around when the training would be delivered to our colleagues.

However, I did get a “consulting” role on both the SMART Board and the elearning groups.  I ended up designing a good portion of the pre-course modules for the SMART Board course, though I must say that Monica did a smashing job of finishing them off, and of the Notebook presentation and recording.  Sadly, I got little to nothing done with regard to the elearning design course.  Monica and Laura were left with the bulk of the work.

When I returned from my leave, however, there was tweaking to be done.  The SMART Board course was a success as it was, but the elearning, having been piloted, needed some rework.  For one thing, it was too long.  Laura was seconded to another working group, and so Monica and I set to.

Shortly thereafter, Monica was pulled onto the WebEx team, or rather became the WebEx team, leaving me to finish off the elearning.  Really, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

I can write though 🙂  So I wrote my way through, like I usually do, and ran the rest on instinct.

I turned the lectur-y, research-y bits into a search and learn pre-course module.  I crammed in metaphors a-plenty, drawing heavily on the resources that my manager threw my way.  I created a post-course assessment, and tidied up the elearning toolkit that Laura had created.

One critical piece I learned was the importance of storyboarding the presentation.  I scripted that sucker out to the last detail.  I also became fairly adept at PowerPoint, and incorporated Notebook activities into each module as review and assessment tools.

I learned a lot writing the course, but in the months since, I’ve learned much more, and I’d love the opportunity to go back and refine things a bit.

When time came to pilot the course a second time, there was only one of our colleagues left to attend, or offer input for review (Thanks, Sandy).  It seemed to go well, but there hasn’t been much call for the course since.  No sooner was I finished with elearning, though, and I was on to the next project.

More on that in a couple of weeks.  Next week I’m going to share a recent, bittersweet experience with you.

Interesting update: Our work of the SMART Board project has been recognized with a service award for our wee working group. (w00t!)

How has the era of reduced budgets and travel affected your training efforts?  Are you adapting courses for online delivery?  How is that working out for you?

My first “real” working group

/ Melanie Marttila

It was an education, that’s for sure.

Ostensibly, I was brought in to advise the group regarding training and supports for a new unit that the working group was to establish.  They’d already been meeting for some time and I had a fair bit of catching up to do.  A further complication was that while there were several members of the group in my office, it was a virtual group.  We met by teleconference.

I got the notification while I was out of town, training.  At first, I thought it must have been a mistake, but I was soon set straight.

I’d never done anything of this nature before, and I was flattered that my manager and director had recommended me for the group, but I was completely out of my depth.

With the responsibility came the looming possibility of a needs analysis.  I didn’t think I knew how to do that.  I started searching the Intranet, found a few ideas, canvassed my colleagues, and got a few more.  Then I started Googling and that’s when things got really interesting.

Here are a few samples of the kinds of things I found:

Of all the resources I’d gathered, many were vague, some differing, and a few in outright opposition.  Most weren’t recent.

I even discussed the topic with my husband Phil, who was going through something similar at work.  What he recommended was a process analysis.  Essentially, the work to be done is broken down into its component steps, and then each step analyzed and potentially broken down further.  With a process analysis, task competencies could be easily identified, and from that, training specific to those competencies determined.  It could also be the basis for procedure and/or policy, or even a screening tool for candidates.  I liked the efficiency of the concept, and found it a reasonable proposal.

The unit had yet to be approved though, and so the people working in it couldn’t be officially identified, nor could the new unit or its potential requirements be discussed withanyone outside the working group.

How was I supposed to determine what training and supports might be necessary for a group of people who had yet to be named?  The process analysis still stood out for me as a solution.  The suggestion was not received with enthusiasm, however.

I had no experience.  I didn’t know how these things worked.  The project lead took my under her wing.  Another member of the group who’d had more experience in working groups than I, was also generous with her time and helped me to understand how things were supposed to go.

We were to cast our net wide, and think of all the possible courses that might be required by the unknown members of the proposed unit.  I researched, obtained estimates for training costs, and started to work on a self-study course for one of the applications that the staff would be using.  I also suggested a SharePoint site, which the group did set up and begin using.

Then we discovered that there was no budget, and most of my work had to be abandoned, the arragnements I’d tentatively made cancelled, and apologies and gratitude distributed tactfully.

About that time, things started getting hectic in my personal life.  My father “took a turn,” as they say, and passed away a week later.  After the family time I’d taken to stay with him during his illness, and my bereavement leave, I was approved for a number of additional weeks of annual and self-funded leave.

When I finally returned, the project and the nature of the unit had changed completely.  The necessary training was accomplished in my absence, my training course was not used, and the working group ceased to meet shortly thereafter.

It felt … anticlimactic.

It was an interesting experience and I certainly learned a lot (mostly about myself).

  • I will dive into a new project, even if I have no idea what it is about.
  • I’m a good researcher, so long as I have a defined goal.
  • I’m not confident in proposing my own ideas.
  • I will defer to the current authority.
  • I’ll adopt current procedures, even if I don’t see the value in them.
  • I’ll pursue my own goals and projects on the side (subversive me).
  • I’ll totally forgive myself when life happens.
  • I know my real priorities.

I still think the process analysis would have worked 🙂

Have you ever been thrown into the deep end?  Did you sink or swim?  Did something else happen?  I like to think I dog-paddled my way to the shallows where other priorities arose and by the time I was ready to dive back in, everyone else left the pool.  Special projects and working groups can be great learning experiences, but they can also be trials.

Storytelling in learning

/ Melanie Marttila

Can you see why this might appeal to the Learning Mutt’s sensibilities?

Last week, I attended a great Webinar by Roger Courville of the 1080 group on incorporating stories into training.

 

 

His tips (in brief):

  • Keep it short and sweet;
  • Keep it relevant;
  • Keep it entertaining; and
  • Bring it back to your topic effectively.

In the past, I have also attended a Webinar by Nancy Duarte regarding her particular angle on storytelling.  Her focus is more on presentation, which, as Roger pointed out, has a different purpose to training.

She looked at the three act story/play structure and saw a “shape” that could apply to verbal discourse.  She analyzed Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs to see if her theory worked, and it did.  She offered critical insights to presentation, and you can look up her TEDxEast lecture on the topic here.

I’ve also attended a Webinar by Terrence Garguilo of makingstories.net.  His point: stories beget stories.  Tell an effective story, and your participants will begin to create stories of their own going forward.

Overall, storytelling in training is a powerful tool.  It’s one of the oldest social networking strategies in existence.

I would encourage you to look up, follow, and/or attend Webinars by these fine people.

How I have used story in training:

  • In design, I use a metaphor to ties things together.  It could be a knightly quest, or planning a road trip, but tying your material into a metaphorical frame work will help to keep everything on track.  This can (and should) extend to the visuals you use/create for the course.
  • In written materials, to link to external resources that are “nice to know,” or might set learners off on a learning tangent.  A lot of blog posts utilize this technique to connect the reader to useful information.  There have been times when I’ve spent upwards of an hour following links from a single post I’ve subscribed to, discovering and learning, connecting the dots.
  • In-class, I’ve used practical stories of my own or other’s experiences to engage participants.

Do you use stories in your training?  In what ways?  Are there opportunities in your training to adopt storytelling as a tool?

An idea that didn’t go anywhere …

/ Melanie Marttila
"Here Lies a Good Idea. Don't Let Your Id...

“Here Lies a Good Idea. Don’t Let Your Idea Die. Put it in the Suggestion Box Today” – NARA – 514482 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So last year I had this idea for a way to evolve training for both our clients and our staff.

Essentially, the idea was to have online, self-study, or asynchronous, courses for our client groups, to teach them about our business, what we could do for them, and how to make the most of our service offerings.

A secondary tier, or phase, of the training would have introduced clients to the way we do our work, a kind of insider’s guide, which I termed a certification program.  Taking some of these more advanced courses could have been an asset for our hiring group, so that when jobs were posted, the links to these courses could be included, and completing them could give applicants an advantage, because they would have some knowledge of our business and the work that we do.

Internally, our training products could be converted to online, self-study materials as well, designed to harmonize with the public ones, and in conjunction with informal learning strategies like coaching and mentoring, replace the costly and time-consuming, in-class training we now provide.

I contacted a colleague to get her opinion, and she graciously offered to give me a venue to discuss the concept and get some feedback.  I had never written a proposal in our business before, nor did I know how to go about gaining approval for my idea.

While the session was great and I got some serious validation for the idea, I didn’t get much with respect to next steps.  There was a plan in the works for a kind of online suggestion box for employee ideas, but that wouldn’t be up and running until sometime in the next fiscal year.  Aside from that, I really didn’t have any kind of internal platform to promote the idea, gain support, and move forward with it.

I did follow up with some key management figures from other departments, and tried to escalate the idea through my own management team, but didn’t get much response with respect to who I could approach next, or support with respect to how I could present the idea.

I had to be set it aside for the time being.

Though the suggestion box was eventually launched in September of 2011, and I submitted my idea in early October, I haven’t heard anything since.

Maybe my employer isn’t ready to enact my idea yet.

Still, I think it was pretty good, and even if it doesn’t go anywhere, I consider it to be one of my accomplishments.

Have you had an idea that you weren’t sure how to promote or what to do with?  Who did you approach and where did it go from there?