The Reluctant Trainer:
Training and Technical Training
NANCY HILDEBRANDTSilicon Valley Chapter
While searching the Internet for resources you could use for technical training (which will end up being the next column in this series), I had to do some thinking about similarities and differences between corporate training in general and technical training specifically. I decided that it was worthwhile to talk about that here. After all, you could take a world-renowned management trainer, and he or she would probably fail miserably as a technical trainer. What is it that is different or special about technical training?
Corporate Training
Corporate training I define to be any training that occurs within a corporation or that is provided by one corporation to another. Corporate training can be of the following types:
- Soft skills training involves behavior modification. It includes
courses such as management techniques, negotiation skills, creativity,
diversity awareness, interpersonal communication, and teamwork.
- Safety training I put into its own category because the purpose
of the training is often that it is mandated by law, for which knowledge
must be demonstrated to some criterion level. Examples are driver education,
lab safety, and first aid.
- Technical training requires the development of procedural skills in order to perform tasks such as operating equipment, using software, or following an industrial process. Successful course completion may result in certification, but an easy way to demonstrate mastery is to perform the processes learned in the course. (The latter can be thought of as the “Nothing-Succeeds-Like-Success” assessment method.)
The Training Umbrella
What do these types of training have in common? They all fall under the principles of instructional design. There are quite a few different instructional design models (see the Resources section below), but they generally involve analyzing the learner, the instructor, the instructional materials, and the learning environment.
Client needs analysis: What are the instructional goals? Is the training necessary at all?
Instructional analysis: What are the details of the processes or knowledge that the learner must acquire?
Learner analysis: What prerequisite skills or knowledge does the learner need? Are there characteristics you can expect from your learners, such as learning style, culture, or comprehension abilities?
Performance objectives: What will your learners be able to do when they finish the course? Objectives must be stated in such a way that each is measurable.
Assessment: How will you measure performance on these objectives?
Instructional strategies: How will you present the information? Information design plays a major role here, based on the results of your needs, instructional, and learner analyses.
Design and development of materials: This should be easy once analysis and planning has been done.
Feedback: This is an iterative process. The goals, analyses, and objectives may change as you evaluate the success of the course.
For more information about instructional design, see the Resources section below.
Technical Training
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Client needs analysis Adult learners will be most receptive when they learn procedures in a context that they perceive as relevant to their work. Based on a good client needs analysis, you can focus on the set of procedures that they will need, and you can set the procedures into example contexts that are meaningful to them. One of the most common failings in technical training (and in technical writing, for that matter) is that concepts or procedures are presented with no explanation of why the learner would want to know that information. Using relevant examples before you introduce the procedures makes the purpose very clear. |
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Audience analysis/Instructional strategies In soft skills training, the instructional strategy is often to provide the learners with one or two take-home messages and fill up the rest of the time with examples, anecdotes, and activities. This makes sense when the purpose of the training is behavior modification. It’s hard to modify behavior, so you want to provide a simple objective with lots of examples showing how to achieve it. It’s not uncommon to find boxes of toys in a soft-skills training class to encourage creativity and playfulness. In technical training, the objective is to learn how to use something or how to do something, and if your audience is a group of technical people, they are used to sifting through vast amounts of technical information, often poorly organized and poorly written. Their attitude tends to be: give me what I need, don’t waste my time. Such a group welcomes an information-heavy instructional strategy; in fact, they may be insulted if you try to keep it simple. I might bring in candy but I would never bring in a box of toys. What does a group like this get from training that they could not get from looking at a manual?
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Technical trainer/Subject Matter Expert In technical training it is easy to tell when the trainer does not know the subject matter. Bluffing is easily spotted as well. My rule of thumb is that I’m unwilling to train in a course in which I have to answer “I don’t know” to more than 50% of the questions. This doesn’t mean you’re necessarily drowned when you find yourself in over your head. A friend of mine went to a client site to teach a course on installing and configuring a software product. When he arrived, he discovered they were expecting a course on customization, an area he didn’t know much about. He started the class by announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am the wrong person and I came with the wrong course content for what you need to know. But let’s see if we can salvage this. I’ve got some manuals, so you tell me what you need to know and we’ll figure out together how to do it. Meanwhile, we’ll just make sure your product is installed and configured properly.” It turned out that some of the customization problems they had been having were arising from installation and configuration issues. Beyond that, the students related the problems they were having, and they worked on the solutions as a group. At the end of the second day, an executive of the client company walked into the room, and the students enthusiastically demonstrated what they had learned and how it would solve their problems. The executive was thrilled. The course instructor received a very high rating from the participants. In some cases, you might prefer to have an instructional designer or trainer design and develop the course and a subject matter expert actually do the training. Or you could set up a format in which a subject matter expert visits the training room periodically to answer saved-up questions. There is an excellent article that compares the use of technical trainers and subject matter experts for IT training (see the Resources section below). |
Resources
For an overview of various instructional design models see the following Web pages:
http://malachi.etl.vt.edu/mtds296/_Root/Lesson04/IDModels.htm
For a standard systems approach to instructional design, see the following book:
Walter Dick, Lou Carey, James O. Carey, The Systematic Design of Instruction, ISBN: 0321037804.
You can also get a good overview of this approach by doing an Internet search for the keywords “dick carey instructional design.”
There are also new models intended to shorten the instructional design process called “rapid prototyping.” You can also get information about these models by doing an Internet search for the keywords “rapid prototyping instructional design.”
For an article on the relative merits of technical trainers and subject matter experts in IT training, see the following article at the Tech Republic Web site:
http://www.techrepublic.com/article.jhtml?id=r00620001121fin01.htm
You will need to go through a free registration process to view this article.
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Summer 2001 (Volume 4, #3)
Copyright © 1998, 2002 Society for Technical Communication