WANT BETTER TRAINING? SPROUT A SUIT-HEAD

WANT BETTER TRAINING? SPROUT A SUIT-HEAD

-By Patti Shank

When we were in our 20s, my friends and I vowed to never become suits. Too conventional! And dull! So I have been known to flinch when someone accuses me of crossing over to the dark side when I ask about things like cost and impact on problems. Cost? Impact? Problems? When I talk like this, I can see by the look on others’ faces that they're concerned because I have sprouted a business head where my instructional designer's head should be.

But we need to sprout suit-heads because what we do as instructional designers has to make sense business-wise. It has to solve real problems and generate real results. Otherwise, we lose credibility, influence, and the right to have much of a say in anything -- and these outcomes are far too common in our profession.

When is a suit-head needed? Let me explain through some examples.

Someone shows me an online course his group is building. It’s really attractive and has a highly complex Flash interface. It's clear (because of the content) that the course will regularly need updating. I ask him what provisions were made so that the client can easily keep it updated. "They'll need to pay us big bucks to keep it updated for years to come," he explains, while laughing. I scoff because (with my suit-head on) I know that no one has unlimited resources.

Someone else shows me an online course for an audience that typically doesn't have access to the Internet during the work day. I ask when learners will be able to use it and she explains that that isn't her problem. She was asked to put it online and that's what she did. My suit-head thinks it would be better AND cheaper to make the course print-based so that learners can tap into it when they have breaks on the job.

Potential clients even fall into this trap. The operations director from a software company inquired about putting training for his company’s complex software application online. He explained that new users had to wait too long to get into classroom-based training. While they waited, they used the system and regularly screwed up the data because they didn't understand how the system worked. So, training them quickly was a major need, he said.

With my suit-head on, I asked him to explain how people came to screw up the data. He logged in and showed me how easy it was to create double or triple entries for each person in the system. After watching him use the system and asking additional questions, I agreed that online training for new users would likely be beneficial, but it likely wouldn’t solve the screwed-up data problem. That seemed to be caused by a usability flaw. I asked if I could watch real users use the system to gather more data and he was visibly annoyed with me. Someone else got the work (and the solution didn't solve the data problem). I felt sad because this problem needed to be solved and the solution wasn't difficult.

What do all these examples have in common? The solutions were wasteful, didn't solve the problem, or both. My suit-head is heavy and often uncomfortable (How do suits stand wearing ties?), but when I use it, it helps me provide better results.

Understanding the real business need isn't a nice-to-do but a need-to-do. This means knowing how the business works and what it needs to be successful, asking respectful questions, analyzing data, watching people work, and not building “solutions” until the problem is clear and what's needed to solve it is apparent. Training may not be the right solution or may be only part of the solution. And often, there are cheaper and more effective solutions than what folks originally have in mind.

In the end, being a problem-solver trumps being a training builder every time. And while I might sprout a suit-head as needed, I'm far from conventional. I wear a tie-dye shirt underneath!

Shank is an instructional technology and instructional design consultant, trainer, writer, and co-author of Making Sense of Online Learning (Wiley, 2004). She can be reached through her website: www.learningpeaks.com.

source: vnu learning