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Developing Training Talent

New media requires new skills

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Trainers: Groom To Be Your Replacement

Today, more than ever before, IT training managers must look for new talent and specialized skills when adding additional training staff. E-learning is growing in popularity and will soon become the preferred method of delivering highly-targeted skills development programs. Like it or not, face-to-face (FTF) training will become the dinosaur of HR development: limited to the executive suites and other limited venues.

But where will training departments find the trainers capable to prepare e-learning programs? Although many independent presenters with experience in FTF training will transfer to e-learning platforms and offer to develop training programs for you, the horizontal transfer isn't happening fast enough to meet the demand for computer-mediated training (CMT). New talent must be developed with the specific skills required to prepare and present CMT programs. One place to seek these new trainers is within your own organization. Look to re-skill your current trainers.

Just as IT and engineering departments routinely re-skill technicians for new technologies. For example, system administrators continually undergo technical training to keep on top of new network operating systems, security, and protocols: this is a form of re-skilling. IT trainers must learn to think in the same terms. The skills learned during train the trainer programs and in thousands of hours in the classroom won't go to waste. Think of these inter-personal skills as the foundation on which e-learning programs will be built. Computer-mediated training programs must still have a personal side to them, they must appear to have been created by a human for humans. Learning will continue to be stressful for many IT users, so the trainer's ability to facilitate the transfer of technical knowledge, not just lecture, must transition to the new media, the e-learning media.

In the same way that IT trainers urge supervisors to integrate ongoing learning into career paths for the general workforce, the same trainers must integrate learning to present training in new, more efficient media.

I dislike putting a dollar value on training, I think trainings worth much more than money, but once the $49 or $29, or $9 e-learning seminar shows up that claims to present the same material in four hours as your $225 full-day seminar, you'll be out of business. You won't even have time to empty your desk, you'll be out the door so fast. We may intuitively know that the $9 half-day "seminar in a box" isn't as effective as our full day spent hand holding and interacting with the learners, but I dare you to argue that to a personnel manager who's facing widespread budget cuts and layoffs. She's trying to get more work done with less people, and nine bucks in four hours sounds a lot better than a couple of hundred bucks and a full day of lost work.

If you'd like to still keep training within a few years, you better learn how to create and present e-learning seminars. If you've never participated in an e-learning seminar, don't wait any longer. Register for the next available seminar as soon as possible. If you're on a tight budget and schedule, join the HTML Writers Guild (HWG). The Guild offers a wide selection of seminars, some of which will commence just after the holidays. Membership is less than fifty dollars and the seminars cost even less than that. I've participated in a few programming courses through the HWG, and I thought the they were great. We communicated via message boards with one another, and the course kept a fast paced and was easy to follow.

I'm interested in your thoughts regarding how the IT training industry is changing. Send your comments to me via e-mail, member@itrain.org, or post them to the association's message center: itrain.org/msg/.

Call for Comments

References

Previous issues are on our website at http://itrain.org/itinfo/.

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updated December 21, 2001