Trainer’s Notebook

Many trees have been transformed into paper to publish the many, many analyses of the coming “Skills Gap.”

Could they have more productively been processed into Presto-Logs?

Predicting organizational distress is a small industry in itself. Yes, everyone knows the boomers are going to retire. Yes, they have skills, experience, knowledge of value. What we don’t know is whether organizations can become adept at capturing the value through knowledge-management programs, and conveying it to the surviving employee base. Gurus began pointing to Wikis, talent management processes, and a variety of other tools. Who’s paying attention?

Remember the Y2K Crisis?

My friend Robert Cenek forwarded me the recent survey by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College found that, among 450 employers surveyed, fully 60% expected employees in the post-50 age group to stay 2 years longer than the current median retirement age of 65. Most decision-making on retirement age was in the employees hands. The survey explored what effects the delayed retirements would have on 1) the knowledge base of the organization, 2) promotion ladders, 2) labor costs, etc.
A careful perusal of the survey questions and results, triggers several questions:
1) If more older workers are going to stay in the workforce, is there an effect on the way learning/performance programs are deployed?
2) How does an organization identify key knowledge/skills to capture?
3) What are some examples of knowledge irretriveably lost?
4) How does an organization know if they’re on the right path?

I’m at BarcampBank Seattle - a great way to spend a Saturday. About 35 people are spending their Saturday in a 3rd floor open office/conference space in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. While the building is over 120 years old, the ideas are freshly baked as this morning.
Some individuals have brought topics they’re here to discuss. A lot more of us are here to hear interesting ideas. Since this particular FooCamp-style event is about banking, there are a lot of people here to talk about issues like Credit Union customer satisfaction, community-based currencies, new online financial exchange systems.
I’m looking to use this Foo-Camp/Bar-Camp model in the local American Society For Training & Development chapter’s “Future of Training” conference September 25.
In the old-style seminar model you recruited “good” speakers, based on their reputation or their business affiliation, and they came and stood in front of a room and showed their PowerPoint presentation graphics, engaged the audience, demonstrated an online simulation or how to do something. They were funny. They were authoritative. Told great stories. They were comparable to your best professor in college.

In the new model someone may do a presentation or just start doodling words and diagrams on a wall of white board, and asking the audience engaging questions, and then people start kicking in ideas. They may show new software or a website, and engage discussion on it. The topics at this camp range from “The iPhone in economic exchange” or “Community money systems - the neo tribalism.”
One Seattle credit union marcom manager challenged a group by saying that if your customer satisfaction score isn’t a 9 on a scale of 10, you won’t receive referrals from your customers anymore? Know who gets a 9? Harley Davidson.
BARCAMP LEARNING EDGE
People may learn more, because they’re sitting in a particular room on a topic in which they’re interested, asking questions, challenging each other.
The topics may be about tight, narrow questions - because there may be 10 topics going on at once in different corners - compared with the old model where there are maybe 2 to 4 presenters in break-out sessions.
The people who are attracted to such events are highly curious - they’re way out on the front edge of the bell-shaped-curve of learners.
I’m curious about what portion of the general audience of an ASTD chapter will come to an event like this without knowing much about the specific topics or discussions or demonstrations in advance? How can you get people to commit to moderating? How can you get people to post “Topics I’d Like To See Discussed”?
Time for a big wide-open SurveyMonkey query?

Most of you may find the famous admonition to physicians familiar: “Physician, Heal Thyself.” Not to be confused with the hyppocratic oath: “Do No Harm.” Both are useful for trainers and others working in human performance.

I was recently viewing Marcus Buckingham’s profound “Trombone Player Wanted” and was moved by how effectively he makes the point (over and over) that people do best what pleases them most. The corrolate is that people won’t do what they don’t like no matter how much you train them.

Well, they will somewhat.

Reluctantly.

Grudgingly.

Possibly at some personal cost to their sense of balance, harmony, self-worth.

When I speak with out-of-work trainers and instructional designers I oftentimes find them struggling with this balance. How to find a job that doesn’t have too much obnoxosity involved. Some people won’t apply for a job that involves classroom delivery. Some don’t want a job that doesn’t mostly consist of classroom delivery. Some just came from a job that started out mostly classroom delivery and ended up mostly administration. For anyone considering a job change or stuck in the middle of one, my new admonition is going to be “know what you want to do - with whom - how - and the color of the wall coverings.” The with-whom is important. People who think independant consulting will work but then find the lonliness is getting you down - don’t be surprised! Or the ambiguity of how to do everything - the bookkeeping, marketing, recordkeeping, keeping up on technology, training yourself. Yes, training yourself. Well, who else is going to do it? Trainer - train thyself!

I’ve been wondering recently whether there’s an “ideal” method of creating an online community of trainers?
Take a look at some recent models of successful communities:
1) Yahoo Groups - rose in popularity in 2000-01 - useful for posting questions, moderating discussions around a particular topic, organizing your service club or scout troop. Forwards e-mails to the whole group.
2) Tribe and other online communities rose in popularity in 2003. The ability to create a home page about yourself and link up with friends is pretty flexible. Several competitors challenge the model with slightly different features.
3) Linked-in gains popularity as a business site in 2005. Is this community?
4) Message boards - still functioning to created threaded, searchable content
5) ASTD-PS puts up a File Sharing site in June, 2006. Register, begin sharing files and commenting on others’ documents, connecting.
What else?

People have frequently asked me at our meetings how they can get into a career in training, or how they can leverage up to a higher level of training, i.e. step up from trainer to training program manager, etc.

I’m always happy to relate how I stumbled into training and apprenticed to an experienced trainer. However, he current work climate makes formal training and certification a key career move. Want to move up? Train up!

The national ASTD organization offers a number of Certificate programs - attend a workshop and take a test. They also offer a Certification the Certified Professional Learning Practitioner. Certification is a new program, based on research into Core Competencies of training. The Certification allows you to take a test and submit a “Work Product” with explanation, and show what you know.

There is a set of workbooks on the Core Competencies available from the ASTD bookstore ($450 for ASTD National members) and the test, from what I can tell, costs $995. There may be other minor filing costs. I just ordered the workbooks - May 24, 2006.

My thought is to invite other ASTD-PS chapter members who wish to add CPLP credentials to go through the process of testing and submitting “Work Product” with in 2006. The “Work Product” details can be found here.
http://www.astd.org/astd/cplp/cand_bul.htm

By forming such a self-directed learning team we are certainly showing we know how to not only talk the talk, but Walk The Walk.

If you don’t have complete documentation on a past piece of training, or haven’t designed and built and measured training in the past, you can use one of our Chapter’s Professional Development projects as your work. Get ready to roll up your sleeves and volunteer.

More info will be posted on the Discussion Board on the ASTD Puget Sound Chapter website.

What a spectrum of techno-philes (tech lovers) to techno-phobes (tech-averse) we have in America! If your grandmother just isn’t interested in that iBook the kids gave her, she’s a part of a third of the population that isn’t using the internet, and doesn’t want to. Another third are catching every advantage the internet tosses their way. And then there’s the middle group.

Organizations of all sizes are jumping into online learning and blends (blended learning) of face-to-face supported by online learning. As this trend continues, I expect people will want to sort-out the easy and inexpensive ways to get involved - and figure out the relative costs of more comprehensive online learning. Here are some observations:
1) Nothing beats just sending learning content - PowerPoint files, Acrobat how-to documents. The cost to produce and deliver is in the cheap-tricks category.
2) Blogs, while somewhat limited, are also an easy-entry content delivery method, especially where fresh content is important.
3) Web-conferencing - more of a hurdle to enter than many believe, but once you’ve learned how to use Webex or LiveMeeting the cost to deliver the meetings isn’t great. Getting people to link-up and stay tuned-in depends on the lure of the content, and buzz on how effective you are. Do you tell jokes?
4) Dynamic HTML - web pages with fill-in opportunities - take tests - process your input - give you a grade - record and report results. This is gaining popularity. Developers need to know html, etc.
5) Asynchronous flash and video - available 24-7. This adds a lot of interest to number 4, and is becoming common. Expect to see lots and lots of work for people who can develop a full range of this type of content.
6) Full Blended Solutions, involving all of the above. Expect to see a lot of highly compensated work involving all of the above.

Well, it wasn’t enough to just have people come up, unexpectedly, and say “Gee, Howard, that Fundamentals of Training program was really great!”

See, one thing I know is that people don’t want to appear to be WHINERS.

I know I sure don’t. Do you?

So what if, for every person who liked the seminars, there were two who didn’t. Will they demand a refund? Will they tell 9 friends what a ripoff it was? (See bottom for answers)

The point I’m driving at is you can now conduct a very sophisticated online poll of up to 99 people for free, and have the results tabluated automatically through a service at surveymonkey.com. You can see our ASTD survey as an acrobat document. Once you’ve set up an account you can design a survey with anything from simple Yes/No answers to Fill-In boxes, ranked-option answers, etc. This is something that would take many hours to code in .php for your MySql database, so why bother? They give away surveys with up to 99 responses, and charge for surveys with over that number of responses.
Some Tips:
1) Unless people have a powerful incentive to complete your survey, keep the process brief: five questions is a really good number.
2) Take the survey yourself and time it to see how long it takes.
3) Send it out to a couple of other people and ask them to take it and give you their impressions. Sometimes people are pretty willing to deconstruct your questions, or give you some canny ideas about phrasing the questions. You can zero-out the responses before you launch your survey to the actual audience.
2) Tell your survey audience it will only take them a few minutes to respond. SurveyMonkey will tell you in the detailed results page how long it takes each respondant. My median on my most recent survey is just under 4 minutes, and the longest respondant took 5 minutes and 3 seconds.
3) It’s fine to ask the same question from different angles. This will help people get around their “NO-WHINING” gag response. For instance, you can ask these questions:
- Was there anything we have done in the past year in delivering training programs which you felt could have been done better?
- Have you attended a training program in the past year that really exceeded your expectations? What gave it that extra pizzaz?
- Was there any moment in the past year when you remember we disappointed you? How?
These are all the same question asked from different perspectives, right?
Oh, you think the second one was a ringer? Well, I’ll tell you what I think of that…

(ANSWERS: Probably not. Probably.)

We’ve heard lots of good feedback on the American Society for Training & Development’s Puget Sound Chapter “Fundamentals of Training” series. First, people felt it did cover the fundamentals. Second, we were very lucky to get a double-handful of really experienced trainers and training managers to put it together - so they had a wealth of recent real-life experience to draw on in giving examples, horror stories, humorous anecdotes about disasters avoided, patches of quicksand, frustrations.
Third, we filled the thing up. Easily. There is a big demand for this information, especially delivered in a context where people can network with other trainers. So we’re off and running and as often as we want to offer this we’ll likely have a measure of success.
The professional association for trainers, afterall, SHOULD offer training on how to be a more effective trainer:
- conduct effective training needs analyses
- design training effectively
- choose the right mix of training methodologies to keep the interest of all the myriad types of learners in an organization
- deliver the training and measure results
Our next effort, over and above running “Fundamentals of Training” again, will be to offer a program on “Training Technologies.” This is a bit of a niche market right now, but it’s the direction everyone is heading - toward a blend (blended delivery) of live face-to-face training and training delivered online. Webonaurs, asynchronous delivery, learning sites and podcasts are coming. The only question is how soon YOU will jump aboard.

Another site to stimulate your creativity is, again, Dr. Richard Florida’s website

I like Dan McComb’s concept of putting a “Social Tagging” weighting on ideas, based on how many people on a chat forum are talking about what topics.

Darren Short spoke to the November monthly meeting of the local ASTD chapter in Seattle this week. There were about 40 chapter members in the Mezzo Cafe at the Starbucks Headquarters, sipping our freshbrewed coffee and nibbling on melon and pineapple. Delicious!
OK, Darren gave us some tasty thoughts to chew on as well. He made some
startling points about research into what works in training - and how many people in the field aren’t well-up on what the research says. How do you avoid getting pulled under by the latest riptide fad?

I was struck with this interesting tidbit: after an exhaustive review of research into leadership development several years ago Darren’s team came up with a very novel, and by their results measurement, very effective approach: They enrolled the trainees in book study groups. The groups met frequently to discuss what they were reading, but equally important, the participants were encouraged to keep a hand-written journal and to write how they felt about what they were reading. Many of the books were autobiographies of leaders from many fields.

It seemed to me that this reinforced the idea that the learner wants the information when they want it, and in the form they prefer it. A book is a self-paced learning method, perhaps offering deeper insights and more detailed examples than other forms of presentation.

More to follow soon.