The Reluctant Trainer:
First Principles of Reluctant Training

By NANCY HILDEBRANDT
Silicon Valley Chapter

You may have sensed a trend in the articles I've written for this column so far:

Following this thread, you might expect this to be another article about Web-based training. However, I am going to take a giant step backwards here, return to my roots, and seek alternatives to Web-based training, in fact seek alternatives to training in general.

Why Not Training?

Training is more work than the simple presentation of technical information. Why? All good technical communication requires information design. Training requires both information design and instructional design. Training can be thought of as the presentation of technical information with the addition of exercises and feedback.

Training requires more resources. An instructor is required, or extra design, development, and technology is required to make the training self-paced and self-correcting.

Finally, training usually requires a greater expenditure of time on the part of users of the technical information, given that they must sit in a classroom or spend time doing exercises.

Why is Training Necessary?

Let me take an extreme position and say that training is only necessary in one case: when users need hands-on experience to master complex troubleshooting or problem solving, in which the events that could arise would be too difficult to anticipate and cover with documentation.

Having said that, I am fully prepared to admit that there are cases in which training is not necessary but is preferred by the customer or the user. For example, users need a mental schema of how a product works before they are able to make sense of reference information about the product. This schema can almost always be conveyed by well designed technical information, but how many users who spend a day in class would spend even half that time reading documentation? Users may want the human contact with an instructor, or they want the step-by-step approach entailed in laying out information in small chunks, with the opportunity to respond through exercises and feedback.

The value in the extreme position is that once you have the mindset that training is most often a preference, not a necessity, it opens the way to creative alternatives that can save time and money.

Examples of Hybrid Approaches

Here are some examples in which training was subverted with a hybrid approach.

	Our training group was duplicating the activities of the tech pubs group. The training developers would wait until the manuals for a product were finished, then import the same information into a different template in order to create the training manuals. To reduce the repetition of information, we continued to have classroom training, but trainees were given a copy of the manual rather than training materials, and the classes consisted of activities that required looking up information in the manual. Trainees got more hands-on practice during the class and left the class knowing how to use the documentation.
	At one company where I worked, our client services engineers used the product to develop a number of applications that most customers would want. In order to do this, they had to choose from 214 different commands, each of which had its own parameters and context of use. I was requested to list the commands in a reference manual and train the staff to use them. Instead, I developed a simple performance support database. The commands could be sorted according to their name, their type, their parameters, or the context in which they were applied. The database also contained a field in which the users could add information for the benefit of everyone. I developed a simple interface for this database so that it could be used interactively while customizing the product, and we provided a 20-minute demonstration of how to use the database, with one of the engineers doing the 'driving'. The outcome was so successful that engineering decided to release this tool to customers as part of their software development kit.
	I have not actually had the chance to implement this idea, but I have talked about doing it so much that I might as well include it. Rather than provide introductory standup training classes, which can last for several days and require travel and lodging, I would prefer to present the basic concepts as Web-based training. Successful scores from that course would then be a prerequisite for hands-on intermediate workshops, in which students would work through problems, on their own or in small groups, with a roving expert to provide help.

Beyond Manuals and Online Help

One of the critical requirements in subverting training is that the technical information must be communicated well, in whatever form it is communicated. Poorly presented information forces the reader to work too hard to build the mental schema and, as we know from our own experiences with such things as VCR manuals, this sometimes results in defeat. Training becomes necessary when documentation is poor.

The medium in which the information is presented can also affect its availability and usability. Here are some questions that can guide the decision of how to distribute technical information.

Will the information be updated frequently? Web presentation is ideal.
Will the user best be helped by getting context-sensitive information without having to search for it? Context-sensitive online help or a performance support system is ideal.
Does the user need information to work with complicated computer screens? Usability studies have shown that users prefer a printed manual rather than being forced to keep flipping back and forth between screens.

These questions are not mutually exclusive, but their relative importance helps to determine the solution.

The Extreme View

I hope that if you disagree with the principles of reluctant training, you at least have felt challenged to refine your own position. I would enjoy hearing your views.

Nancy Hildebrandt, Ph.D., is a Sr. Technical Writer at Tumbleweed Communications Corp. in Redwood City, California. She has worked as a training consultant, co-founded an e-commerce Web site, taught at colleges in Japan, and done research at Harvard Medical School on how people process written information. You can reach her at nhild@attglobal.net.