vaporloop

then please train me.

Over the last two days my employer required me, along with 25 or so of my coworkers, to attend a training session for an internal project management tool.  The training was led by one of the engineers that developed the tool.  Now I have nothing against Engineers, I am friends with several.  However most of the engineers I know –  software, electrical, civil — are great at what they do, but lack the ability to explain how to use what they engineer to the average Joe, whether Joe happens to be a rocket scientist, project manager, fellow engineer, or even a plumber. 

When corporations decide they are going to require large numbers of people to attend a training I propose they evaluate the trainer with what I’ll call the Food Network test.  Cooking is really just a process of steps to complete a task.  Granted talk of BBQ ribs, Filet Mignon and Bleu Cheese will wake up most ears quicker than pointing to dialog boxes and drop-down lists, but what makes me land on the food network while channel surfing and lose a half-an-hour of my life is not what so much what’s being cooked, but the excitement and passion Rachel Ray or Bobby Flay or Emeril Lagassi convey when they are presenting the process.  Of course I’ll stop to watch Giarda De Laurentis boil water in silence, but that’s another blog.  Should every PowerPoint presentation be interrupted with a loud “Bam!” between each slide? No. But the presenter needs to convey “I am excited about this because it will help you do your job better/faster/easier/more efficiently and when we’re done you’ll be almost as excited as I am!”  So if the trainer can’t captivate his or her audience, please please please find someone else to present the training.

Corporations also need to decide if something is truly training, or just an overview.  Hint: If it’s a Power Point deck with 150 slides and some screenshots it’s NOT training.  Training means that when you leave you know how to do something.  When I went to driver training I watched a slide-show (okay, a filmstrip, I’m old) with diagrams of the proper moves to parallel park and then I went outside and did it in a real car.  If you’re only showing the process and not reinforcing any learning with “see it, now do it” then the time the corporation is “investing in you” is money and productivity down the toilet forever. If 75 people took this 6 hour training and it costs an average of $40 an hour per person to have them working for you that’s $18,000 blown.  For $12,000 the company could purchase 12 decent laptops and the trainees could actually practice what they are being taught and retain it. Instead of 6 hours per employee you could have someone trained in 2 hours.  And the 12 laptops purchased are there for the next training session. 

I’ll stop trying to make sense now.

I was hoping to launch this blog on 1/1 but our son had other plans.  Not in time for the tax deduction, and too late for the 1st baby of 2009, he decided to join our family on 1/2.  It’s been almost two weeks and we’re trying to figure out what “normal” now entails. 

 Why am I launching a blog?  I’m glad you asked.  My parents spent what was then a lot of money in 1989-93 to send me to college to get a degree in English. Since then I’ve written a lot more code than prose.  The code’s paid my way for the last dozen or so years, but only a few people are able to read it.  In an attempt to dust off the right side of my  brain I decided that this was the year to start writing about stuff. Stuff that I hope you’ll find interesting, entertaining, humorous, and perhaps even informative.  That, and everyone else is doing it.

Happy new year.