Trainer’s Notebook

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.

What a spectrum of techno-philes (tech lovers) to techno-phobes (tech-averse) folks we have in America! If your grandmother just isn’t interested in that I-Book the kids gave her, she’s a part of a third of the population that isn’t using computers, isn’t using the internet, and doesn’t want to. Another third are taking advantage of 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.

If you’ve ever started out in the morning and then realized you left your wallet on the dresser you know that slightly frustrated, slightly sinking feeling. You head back to the house and gather up the wallet and you’re off and running. But what if you went back home and the house wasn’t there? This week I discovered I’d left a MAJOR piece of my busines off my website I got that stomach-drops-six-inches feeling. Vertigo.

That happened this week with this page.

I have taught thousands of people these four critical goals of any business presentation, and I forgot to put them in the website. But they’re up now and available for your consideration. And if you see any other glaring omissions, please feel free to point them out.

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.)