Trainer’s Notebook

When people in HR talk about the “Skills Gap” they are generally referring to people who will retire from an organization, taking valuable “skills” or “experience” with them. It is believed that the cohort of workers born from 1946 through 1960, a big “bulge” in the population, will start retiring soon, and there’s a lot of speculation on what that means.

It’s commonly believed that it will cost a lot to replace this loss. Replacing the lost skill or experience requires:
1) that the organization knows what knowledge or skill is required for the work
2) that it anticipates the loss of the worker
3) a process for capturing and passing along the knowledge\
4) that a new worker is selected who is suited for the knowledge
Running such processes is becoming a part of the parvenu of the “Training Department” and people are looking for best practices like mad.
In reviewing the presentations I have seen in the past year about wiki’s, podcasts, bulletin boards and threaded chat, it occurred to me that the replacement workerbees might benefit from some basic polish-up in their memory skills and reading skills. Afterall, what part of your organization’s workforce ever took a memory course? What part ever took a speedreading course. And who expects their memory or reading skills to get better just by using them? And is your golf game improving each time you play the game?
If you’re puzzled by the above, it’s worthwhile to take a look at these free pages from MindTools.
I recently checked-out some books from the library on speedreading techniques. Most offer a threefold improvement in speed and comprehension. Like your golf game, improvement takes time invested in doing some simple drills.
This falls in the category Steven Covey would call “Sharpening The Saw” except, as mastery learning skills, they really deserve to be called “Sharpening The Saw Sharpener.” I’m amazed at how much speed improvement comes with just a bit of practice.
Now for those rusty typing skills…

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 finally got into Edward R Tufte’s new booklet “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.”
If you use visual aids and want to reach the visual learners in your audience, it’s well worth reading - it’s only 30 pages.
It would also be valuable for people who do financial presentations, use visuals in the courtroom, pitching to Wall Street, or in the boardroom.
I’d been ignoring Tufte’s rants about PowerPoint in recent years. A lot of bad visual aids are created out of ignorance and laziness. But someone recommended it to me, and I must admit I think that he’s onto something.

First, for the faint-of-heart, I’ll warn you that Tufte shows the actual PowerPoint slides that led to the Space Shuttle Columbia’s disasterous re-entry from orbit in 2003. Was the risk analysis botched, then obscured by faulty PowerPoint slides? You can judge.

Tufte has taken his criticism beyond ignorance and laziness. He says that PowerPoint is as disasterously flawed as the Ford Pinto gas tank. It is built to mis-manage decisions, fluff-up faulty ideas and make them appear palatable, to lie convincingly. He says PowerPoint is a child of the software industry, and implies that it’s design is warped by the need to sell vaporware, persuade customers that bugs and security problems don’t exist, and inflate features and profits.

Putting aside these arguments, he nails the inherent incompatibility of meeting rooms, projection screens, and the human field of vision. If you’re 30 feet away from a 5′ X 5′ screen you can’t see much unless the type is VERY LARGE. That means you can’t put much on the screen if you want people in the back to read it.

Now, having said that, I had a GIANT EPIPHANY this week. I was laughing so hard I actually did cry while reading the 2nd half of Tufte’s book. It is full of zany, awful visuals. It all became clear how valuable a 2 or 3 projector system is for leveraging visual aids and learning. One of Tufte’s contentions is that the linear nature of PowerPoint makes it difficult for the audience to compare, contrast, go back, suggest different perspectives, or ask “What if…?” or “What else…?”
A very wide projection surface not only makes it easier for people in the back, it is ideal for these side-by-side comparisons.
For more info on multiple-projector presentations go to www.trizenter.com.
I have one of these 3 projector systems and love to show it off to people. And NO, projectors don’t cost half what they used to.

I recently saw Stephen Krempl, VP of Worldwide Learning for Starbucks, give a presentation on 3-projector presentations. He used 3 projectors, of course, and made some important points about how to boost audience attention, understanding, and recall.
First, when you fill more of the audience’s visual sensorium with your visuals you reduce noise. This is like tuning in your radio and getting rid of the hiss and distortion. We don’t think much about how much the other visual content in the room is diluting the focus of the presentation. The audience is only focused on what I’ve just put on the screen, yes?
No - everything going on in their peripheral vision is competing for their attention, and virtually anything that moves, or even other other audience members who aren’t moving, are adding visual signal to the mix.
Second, it’s well worthwhile to increase the challenge placed on the audience by visuals that require they compare and contrast things. This could be statistical information - past, present, future projections. Design comparisons of one product to another invite comparison - which do you like better? Also, showing several calendarized plans, showing flow charts of different processes, showing visuals with pieces missing - all heighten audience awareness and involvement.
Krempl showed photo spreads of cities across all 3 screens, and would then drop back to using only one screen, having information build from the left screen toward the right, and from the right back toward the left. He calls this approach - in total - instructional geography - using the audience’s visual sensorium to boost attention, understanding, and recall.
I’m going to give it a try.
I know what you’re thinking:
1) How much does this all cost?
2) What sort of room works for this wide-screen formatting?
I think these are interesting issues, but not as important as the paradigm shift issue - if people weren’t using Powerpoint one-projector graphics well, how are they going to learn to use “Instructional Geography?” This is going to be a relatively easy move forward for people who were using single-screen visual aids effectively, and that’s the audience for this technology.
For more info: http://www.trizenter.com

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.

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.

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.

Are you tracking on the big shift to just-in-time training and nano-training? Whoa! The concept revolves around giving people just enough training to help them accomplish a particular critical task that’s needed (or frustrating them) right now.

Imagine having a coach at your elbow each time you try using that software program you got pretty proficient with about 7 months ago, but now have mostly forgotten.
This training works a lot like a traditional application help file. But with better indexing.

Nano-training uses screen captures, flash animations, before-and-after videos, to show how to do things. It avoids the waste of having someone sit still for 8 hours of training, with people of wildly different levels of proficiency, and get 1 hour 23 minutes of content of actual use to them. And forgetting half of what they learned before they can use it.

The content management process can be handled quite readily with databases and search, and the content can be in the form of a .pdf manual, a help file, a searchable chat/posting forum, batteries of flash animations or streaming video, audio, podcast material, audio CD’s to play in your car, and many other forms. Plenty to learn about. I guess there’s no such thing as “spare” time anymore.