Are You Getting Enough Say In Your Training?

DrEducator asks: "Has your company ever contracted external instructors to train its programmers? Have you been satisfied with the lecturer's level of expertise? I think we all have a good grasp of how vital the role of training is to both a corporation and its employees, but given its importance should you have more of a say in selecting or evaluating instructors before they deliver training? I firmly believe in the tenet that 'geeks should train geeks'. Moreover, I think that the geeks themselves have to take a more active role in the whole process. So, I'm curious - do you think you have enough say in your training? Do you actively refer instructors that you've seen at conferences or previously taken courses from (university, college, or adult ed)? If not, have you had the opportunity to interview an instructor, or at least review their qualifications? Share your experience - how much input do you want/need/have?"

Comments

of course

[tanveer1979]

yes you are right. But mostly while delivering such training programs the company has a number of constraints.

• Current Market demands
• Project Goals
• Long term investment to gain ratio
• Value addition Index

So though geeks for geeks is a good idea, managers need to intervene. The right balance should be struck between employee gain and company gain.
But then deciding is not a easy job, and in my expirience employee gain is sacrifised for company gain.
One option would be to be slightly more vocal and talk it out.
The complete geek way is also not theway to go coz then company wont gain everything.

Re:Google Trains Me

[King_TJ]

I know you got modded up as "funny", but you don't know how true that is!

I spent a *lot* of time doing Google searches to research problems with our PCs. I also spent quite a bit of time doing those "sucks" searches to find out if a new product was a potential dud.

Not everyone who posts a complaint with their new scanner or motherboard explains it in a very technical manner, after all.

What makes a good instructor

[TrumpetPower!]

Speaking as somebody who does technical training for large companies (as detailed in my resume), your ``tenet that 'geeks should train geeks''' is less than ideal.

There are two things you want in any teacher:

1. someone who can teach;
2. and someone who knows the subject.

The actual teaching and delivery of a class is essentially a performance. A stand-up comic has to be constantly side-splittingly funny; a teacher has to be occasionally funny and educate the audience. Otherwise, there's not much difference.

A good teacher who doesn't know the subject is obviously (worse than) useless, but somebody who knows the subject but not how to teach is just as bad. You need the two together.

So what makes a good teacher? You've got to be on top of everything: you need to have absorbed the subject so thoroughly that you know it forwards and backwards, inside and out. You need to have that information extremely well organized so that you always know where you are in your own mental map.

When you've got that down, you'll probably also have the confidence that you need to bare your soul in front of a bunch of people. Humans grant authority to those with (percieved) confidence, and you need a great deal of authority to teach: you've got to control all those people.

Every teacher has had a number of different disruptive students. You need to know how to keep people focused on the subject at hand. Usually, this means letting people have their say, no matter how wacko, and using your normal conversational reply to ideally bring the thread back to earth--or, at least, steer it straight. Sometimes, you've got to be blunt: ``I'm sorry, Dave, but this is a class on the Internet, not on the dystopian perspective of the Romanovs. I wish we had the time to explore the Romanovs in more detail, but we've got to get through the dot-bomb in the next forty-five minutes, and we haven't even mentioned how the IPO hype brought in so many investors charged with what Alan Greenspan rightly called `irrational exuberance'....''

Every class has at least a couple students who close up into their shells. People don't learn when they're in their shells. Drawing them out is a challenge. How do you get somebody involved when they don't give you an opening? One very shy girl, I tossed her a real softball and she almost went into the foetal position....

There's a lot more I could go into--passion for the subject, honesty, knowing when to say, ``I don't know,'' and more. I haven't even touched on the preparation: how to make a lesson plan, design exercises and tests, grading, record-keeping, and a lot more. It's just like any other discipline: it takes a lot of time and hard work.

So, don't think that just because somebody is a geek like you and he knows his stuff that he'll make a good teacher. If he's got the archtypal geek personality, you want to avoid his class like the plague--he'll be the proverbial professor who talks in everybody else's sleep.

Cheers,

b&

Geeks taking a role

[tgibson]

Share your experience - how much input do you want/need/have?

I spent many years on the opposite side of this (i.e. working for a firm that delivers training to progammers), so I'll offer advice from that perspective.

Larger companies have their own training departments/divisions. Often, they'll have their own training rooms and/or facilities. If larger companies can overcome their own bureaucracies, they have the greatest power for getting the best-quality training. Trainers fall all over themselves trying to get large accounts. Before offering a large contract to a training firm, the large company should:

1. Send out a proper RFP for training services
2. The screening process should include instructional designers, "end-users" of the training (that's you!), and the end-users' managers.
3. Have 2-3 finalists fly out and give a live presentation of offerings. It should include a demo teach.

Smaller companies have a harder time making the training firms dance because the potential money made is much smaller. They also won't get the big discount that the big companies can get. That said, the smaller companies can send out an request for information (RFI) and collect basic information from potential trainers in a consistent format (rather than surfing training sites, making calls, etc.). Once the information is collected, the end-users, and a couple other folks could conduct phone interviews with potential trainers.

Questions to grill any potential trainer with (for both large and small companies):

1. Can we see a copy of the workbook? (would be included in RFP/RFI)
2. What strategies do you use to contextualize the training? That is, are the exercises/activities presented as part of any sort of "real" situation, or are they decontextualized (e.g. write a program to print your name 10 times)
3. How much time do students spend working on the computer vs. just sitting and listening
4. A big problem with training is that after the training occurs, people return to their desks without the slightest idea how to apply what they've learned. They end up relearning the material for their work situation. What do you do to maximize transfer of your material from your classroom to our workplace?

Re:While "Geeks should train geeks" might seem ...

[CynicTheHedgehog]

I recently attented API training class offered by one of our vendors. It was a 3-day class taught jointly by a customer representative and one of the engineers. The first day ran smoothly; the representative managed to make the class personal and comfortable, and he seemed at home with the slides and printed material. He deferred most of the questions to the engineer, who clumsily spat out biased answers and misinformation. The rep had to leave on some personal errand on the second day, and the class dissolved into a programming exercise reminiscient of a 10th grade BASIC class, wherein the engineer spent all of his time hopping from desk to desk trying to get things to compile on an IDE none of us was familiar with. The agenda and printed materials went right out the window. We learned no new material that day.

The rep stayed at a pretty high level, but it was useful background and it was organized. Between him and the engineer I learned quite a bit. I a figured out a few things myself while I was fighting code on the second day, but not as much as I would have had there been some semblance of order. I much prefered the rational, methodical training offered by the rep and the printed materials to the chaotic, hands-on approach of the agitated engineer.

Re:This smells of free commercialism...

[DrEducator]

Wrong on both counts.

You won't get an answer from me. Sorry.

No need to apologize.

Another industry with turn-over, short-term work

[redbeard_ak]

I just made a similar reply to another post - but it is still relevant to say this here.

Another industry with short-term projects is construction. These guys work themselves out of a job just like we do. The industry also has a cut-throat bidding process.

But there are some big differences on training! Really - contrast the fate of most geeks to a union construction worker, like an electrician. Geeks (most) pay for college. Union construction worker - employer paid apprenticeship program of class-room instruction and OJT.

So how many geeks start out their work careers paying off debt? How many construction workers have debt starting out?

Geeks have to continually upgrade skills to avoid being obsolete. You can check out the responses to this story as to what are chances are.
Construction workers have to upgrade their skills as well - whether mandated safety programs or for new tech. Union construction workers have zero out of pocket costs for this, paid from dues and from employer contributions.

That's why I'm a washtech member. Here's our training program - geeks training geeks.

Why do construction workers have company-paid training? The same reason microsoft forces dell to sell microsoft. The same reason the Washington Software alliance lobbies to kill premium overtime pay for tech workers and bring in more h1-b visas at lower than market pay. These folks organize and use their strength. Why don't we?