Trainer’s Notebook

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.

In my presentations on “Finding Training Work In Seattle” I mention the watering-holes where trainers hang-out:
ASTD Puget Sound Chapter
University of Washington Trainers Certification
Seattle University Masters Program in Adult Education
Intl. Society for Performance Improvement

The Question: “Where are the training dollars invested?” continues to fascinate me.
I visited the Computer Classrooms In Seattle location (in Bellevue) yesterday and toured their for-rent classrooms. Chock-full of PC’s, their classrooms range in capacity from 16 to 35. Ginny Simmons says their heavy users may be Boeing, and other local companies, but the instructors are most-often from out-0f-town, here to do a 3-5 day hands-on workshop on some piece of software or technology, and there’s very little online component.

On the other hand, we have MediaPro, a long-lasting, successful business that’s oriented to computer-based learning and online-learning.

Gaining much of an understanding of which companies are really leading the pack in training, locally, isn’t an easy task. Isn’t it tempting to want to say “It must be Microsoft!”

Keep in mind, Google lets every one of their employees devote one day a week to working on whatever they wish - research, learning, writing spec code for some app that nobody’s intersted in but Joe Programmer.
That’s 20% of the company budget devoted to self-structured research, learning, and serendipity - way above the best-practices industry range: 3-10%.

Can you fault Bank of America for not expecting creative ideas from their tellers? How about Safeco? Nevertheless, there is evidence that the creative businesses in the economy are going to drive growth from now on. Listen to this NPR interview with Dr. Richard Florida of Carnegie-Mellon University, speaking on his 2005 book: The Flight Of The Creative Class. This speaks volumes about what local companies are likely to survive and thrive long-term.

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.

Here is the link to the local American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) chapter’s job-bank Yahoo site. You will have to join Yahoo Goups and join this group to see the jobs.
There seem to be several training and related jobs posted each month.
Here is a sample. Here is another.
Here is another.
What’s not posted is training jobs GOSSIP. Feel free to post some in the comments to this blog.
Never joined a Yahoo Group before? It’s a pretty simple process and you needn’t worry about receiving spam or anything.
1) Go to Yahoo mail. Establish a Yahoo mail account. You needn’t ever use it or look at the contents of the inbox if you don’t wish to, other than the one time below. If you wish to have e-mails sent to another e-mail address each time someone posts a job to the Yahoo group, enter that e-mail address at this point. You can switch this feature off later if you wish.
2) Immediately go to the main Yahoo page and click on the link for Groups.
3) Do a search for ASTDPS
4) Click on the group, to to the group page, and click on “Join This Group”
5) The registration process takes about 20 seconds and you needn’t reveal anything personal about yourself. Note: if you wish to receive e-mails whenever someone posts to this bulletin board, enter an Note: the registration will confirm your e-mail identity by sending an e-mail to your Yahoo e-mail account. Go to the account inbox and click on the message and confirm your identity.
6) Go back to Groups and enter the ASTDPS group and look at the job listings in the Messages section.
HAPPY JOB HUNTING!

The proposal for a 2006 Professional Development program that was approved by the ASTD board last week is available for your review. We look forward to people’s thoughts on this approach. Ideas please! Click here.
Some possible discussion areas: Are these the right objectives? Is this the best approach? Who should the presenters be? Should we work toward measuring results? You can post your comments to this blog, or e-mail them to howardg@com2020.,com

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?

Here are outlines of the TWO professional development series which have been approved by the American Society for Training & Development Puget Sound Chapter Board for 2006. We will begin locating venues and program leads immediately:

Fundamentals of Training
This is a training program consisting of 4 three-hour elements:
1) Needs Assessment
2) Course Design
3) Training Methodologies
4) Presentation Skills - face-to-face, or web-conference

Training Technology for Results
– 4 Three-Hour Seminars
1) Training-Tech: Costs and returns from putting training online - Microsoft-Adobe-Macromedia?
2) Cheap Tricks – making your online learning site involving without spending a fortune –
Show-and-tell from 3 local companies
3) Incorporating online training into your long-term strategic plan – Regence Blue Shield
4) Measuring Results of Online Training – testing, recordkeeping, reporting systems
If you have ideas for either series, please post them or send them directly to: howardg@com2020.com Thank you!

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.

Wednesday night I went to a meeting of a local business networking group called Biznik.com and was fascinated by the speaker:
DL Byron. He goes by plain “Byron” and you can learn about his researches into blogging at his website
.
Some interesting things about blogging:
1) It’s great for have ideas and know how to write.
2) It’s great for relaying your personal narrative, meaning what you think is important, cool, challenging, inspiring, what you’ve been doing, the way you see things, the future.
3) Google loves blogs because bloggers post page links to other bloggers, which boosts everyone
s page ranking. So a blog about the Space Needle can gain a higher Google page ranking than the Space Needle official site.
4) Blogging can enable people to learn a lot more about you than your website. We all treat a website as some sort of formal presentation of who we are. Likely as not, now a website is an expense, and updating it and keeping it interesting with flash animations and other flourishes doesn’t necessarily add value to your clients.
5) It’s a method of connecting with people. The total number of bloggers currently doubles every 5 months.
SO WHAT I’VE DONE — is setup an open-source blogging software application - WordPress on my company server.
If that looks too difficult, there are many other ways of getting into blogging, and some are very easy.