Trainer’s Notebook

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 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.

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.)

A recent post on Bob Cenek’s HR Journal reminded me of talking with John Simonds of Martin-Simonds a few years ago. Martin-Simonds specialty was the “engagement” of professionals in engineering and architecture firms, and the effects on client satisfaction. Engagement in this instance refers to the client relationship. It was John’s mantra that most engineering professionals are myopic about the projects on which they’re working. They forget about the human client who’s actually got to approve the work and send them a check.

When John would interview clients, oftentimes managing multimillion dollar budgets for engineering services, they would often state that they were actively seeking another firm to take over the work. This was about 16% of the large client base he surveyed over three years. There was another segment- about 20%, that weren’t actively seeking a new firm, but who were open to any reasonable offer to “trade-up” to a more conscientious customer-oriented firm. Oftentimes, this 36% had been driven off by poor listening, repeated and unapollogetic disappointments, failing to meet deadlines, switching project engineers, etc. The issue was seldom the quality of the project work. Clients want to receive a birthday card, a donation to their favorite charity, a call once in awhile between projects just to get together for coffee or lunch. Sound familiar? It’s what everybody wants, whether you’re a client or an employee.

So how much of our time do we spend on the human side of our key relationships each week? Would 10 percent of our time be sufficient? Yes? No?

Selling training is similar in many regards to selling any other professional service. If I’m a massage therapist talking with a prospective client I’ll probably ask where it hurts.

One of the unending jobs (Pain Points) in the datasphere is managing the information. In blended learning (multiple forms of delivery, possibly including live delivery, online content, learner interaction or even learning group activities, testing, etc., etc.) the job of managing the information falls to a suite of software applications. These may be called learning management systems or content management systems. An example of a learning management system is Moodle. An example of a content management system is the Microsoft Content Management Server. Knowing the players in the LearningSphere is useful in selling training solutions. If you’re a content expert you may need a translator who speaks the language.

Example: Microsoft ’s product, Content Management Server, describes its benefits simply. The year 2002 attached to the product tells me they may not take the category very seriously. Perhaps they think that other MS services do the rest.

Here’s a site that allows you to test-drive a bunch of open-source CMS applications.

A lot of wonderful options to consider. Do you want multiple authors to work on the content? Who gives legal approvals on content? Is there a build-out/refresh plan the authors need to see to do their work? Do you want to make chat and posting available to the learners?

Imagine a corporate learning site with 10 broad areas of education going on, courses scheduled out months in advance and the site tracking participation and test results, and offering records and reports going back several years. Each of the 10 areas has 10 courses, with one instructor and 20 students – that’s 2000 students. Each with a login. Each course might have from 50 meg. to 1 gig of storage for files, downloads, especially for flash or streaming video.

This is what SumTotal is selling. MediaPro sell a custom content solution, perhaps helping you choose a CMS, or going with the one you’ve chosen?

Who buys training? Just about anyone might, right? Someone needs to polish their Spanish, so they order a course from www.multilingualbooks.com.

What sparks big projects? Big Budgets?

Driven by $$ ROI Results:
Operations Cost Reduction
Risk Reduction
Sales Increase
Customer Satisfaction Improvement - repeat customers are more profitable
Employee Performance Improvement - reducing HR costs
Equipment Service Cycle - reducing repair costs, extending equipment life
Product Release Cycle - seeking competitive product positioining

Entry Points in Organizations to find such project needs:
Profit Center Manager
Training Manager
Marketing Manager
HR Manager

My favorite story about finding training work goes back about 15 years. I was sitting at a Mariners game - typical business networking function - chitchatting with strangers. I exchanged introductions with a woman named Marianne Katzinski. Marianne had been working in the telecommunications industry and was now getting her real estate license. Coindidentally, I ran into her a week later at still another networking event and she said: “Hey, I can give you the name of the local Branch Manager for MCI and the Training Manager for McCaw Cellular.” I followed-up with phone calls and both companies became very profitable clients.

Who’s going to steer you to your next big project?

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.

On Tuesday morning David Merwin and I went to meet with Richard McNeil and his people at Wasser Studios. Wasser does a vast amount of technical documentation and helpfile work and their sister office in Dallas does a lot of tech training development. Richard wants to do more of that too. I put about a dozen hours into a presentation on “What’s Hot In Training” and “How To Sell Training” - two separate pieces.
What’s Hot in Training
1) Combining traditional adult learning with Instructional Design and Results Measurement. Instructional Design: breaking the ideas, skills, and attitudes to be learned down into small components, and building up training systems that work.
2) Resulting training can be delivered live or in any number of “remote” methodologies, i.e. webconference, DVD, website.
3) Results Measurement can be accomplished in many ways and on several levels. The most common reference we all use for measuring results is the Kirkpatrick scale, which has four levels. I told the group that results measurement is the Holy Grail of selling training, because if you can measure some specific return-on-investment that matters to the organization, they know their budget was well-invested. We also viewed David Merwin’s video examples reel and talked about video in training and video in corporate communications.