Dave’s Whiteboard

I participated in a webinar on CompTIA’s certificate for online trainers.  I hadn’t heard of the CompTIA CTT+ before (that’s “certified technical trainer”) but they probably hadn’t heard of me, so we were even.  All I’d done was enroll for the session as part of preparing for a project that will involve training and evaluating instructors.

I’m of two minds about certificates, credentials, what-have-you.  On the one hand, in an ideal world you’d like a way of determining that those who provide some service or carry out some task have the competence to do so.  Yet few of us look much past a certificate once it’s in place.

I’m similarly ambivalent about ISPI’s certified performance technologist status, though I am a CPT; you have to renew every three years, and I can’t decide what the benefit would be, other than retroactively justifying the initial fee and the subsequent renewal.  An odd way to approach professionalism.

It seems to me that in the corporate and organizational worlds, the number of such designations is exploding.  I wonder if the field will turn into a clone of real estate or life insurance, where every other practitioner has a little flotilla of letters after his name.

(I’ve started noticing ads from real estate agents pointing out that they are certified distressed property experts. Where was all this expertise when the housing bubble was expanding?)

CompTIA is the Computer Technology Industry Association ( “the voice of the world’s $3 trillion information technology industry,” if they do say so themselves).  Apparently they have developed a number of IT certification examps for things like networking, server technology, and RFID.  The CTT+ certificate (which comes in two forms: “certified classroom training” and “certified virtual classroom trainer”) is based on performance-based exams — e.g., you take a written test, and then submit a recording of yourself conducting a virtual classroom (i.e., synchronous online) training session.

No tidy conclusion here — I’m hoping people might join in with their own thoughts on the value of certification (or, conversely, the value of having ways to assess competence in some area).

Photo of stained glass window by cobalt123.

This post is my contribution to the October edition of the Working / Learning blog carnival, hosted at the Xyleme Learning Blog.
(What’s a blog carnival? Details here. If you blog about learning in a work setting, or about working deliberately at learning, you should take part.  Don’t be shy.)

In a recent post, Beyond Training, Harold Jarche (in one of his comments) gives his rule of thumb: “Training is the last resort, when all other performance improvement alternatives (which are usually cheaper) have been discounted.”

Instead of “discounted,” I might have said “examined.”  Otherwise, Harold’s highlighting a dilemma that corporate and organizational training departments (by whatever name) have been struggling with decades.

Here’s the deal: there are all kinds of ways to instruct efficiently and effectively.  You can design (as Bob Mager and Peter Pipe said more than 30 years ago) criterion-referenced instruction so you don’t waste people’s time “teaching” them what they already know.  You can sequence, you can use increasing approximations of the real-life job, you can avoid war stories and nice-to-know.  You can avoid spoon-feeding.  You can emphasized hands-on, problem-based exercises.

But… a lot of the time you don’t have to do those things.  How much of “training” is a kind of corporate Clearasil applied to the zits of a counterproductive computer system or an alleged process that’s really the business equivalent of the cowpath that became a paved street?

How much of what some subject-matter expert or department head thinks people really oughta know (or, worse, really oughta wanna know) actually matters?

It may be that people don’t know this stuff (whatever “this stuff” is).  It’s less clear that traditional training is the way to change the outcomes.

For many people, the father of “performance improvement” was Tom Gilbert; I had the chance to meet him several times, and his thinking has permanently influenced my own.  Some time back I quoted his model for creating incompetence.  Consultants Joseph and Jimmie Boyett published a crisp article (PDF) explaining why the performance-improvement model makes sense.

It’s worth a look; it tracks with Harold’s point about training as a last resort.  In essence, Gilbert would approach a performance problem (a gap between the results you want and the ones you have) like this:

• Do people have the information they need?
  (Notice, that’s not “do they know?”  Gilbert is talking about information about how to perform and about how well you’re doing.)
• Do they have the instruments they need — tools, methods, technology, whatever?  You can train pharmaceutical workers in all kinds of good manufacturing practice, but if (as at one location I worked in) people have to walk from packaging line A to line B because line A doesn’t have the right kind of scale — and you’re measuring residue in fractions of a gram — you risk not getting the accuracy you claim you need.
• Do you have incentive systems to support the performance you need?  If the customer comes first, do you punish people for not completing their end-of-the-day paperwork by a set time?  If your speeches are about relationship selling, are the annual award winners the salespeople who pushed product?
• Only after examining these other influences on performance would Gilbert ask whether people have the skills and knowledge to perform.  As the Boyetts say,

By correcting deficiencies in information, instruments, and incentives first, you make sure you don’t end up training people to use tools that could be redesigned, or to memorize data they don’t need to remember, or to perform to standards they are already capable of meeting and would meet if they knew what these standards were.

I love working in this field; I get excited when people in client organizations produce better results on the job.  What has mystified me since I read Mager in grad school and Gilbert’s Human Competence in the late 1970s is why otherwise sensible organizations waste millions of dollars (and millions of worker hours) trying to talk or PowerPoint or click-enter or multiple-choice people into worthwile results.

Photo of criterion-based traffic test by Birger Hoppe.

I’m not foolish enough to try and improve on Cathy Moore, whose Too Basic? Chop It! needed only 273 words.  (And “duh” accounts for 5 of them.)

I cracked up reading one part, which reminded me of a certain type of “subject-matter expert” fretting about leaving out important information:

But what about the two people who don’t know what “email” is?

UPDATE on 10-21) This post was going to be part of the October edition of the Working / Learning blog carnival, hosted at the Xyleme Learning Blog.  Leean and I have decided to move the date for that edition of the carnival to October 27th.
(What’s a blog carnival?  Details here. Don’t be shy.)

Harold Jarche’s post, Beyond Training, got me thinking about the arc (or the scattergram) of my own career.  Part of Harold’s point is that social media, with the connections and the immediacy that they enable, may herald the end, or at least the decline, of the factory approach to organizational training… and maybe even learning.

He might be right, though I think that large organizations will take a long time shifting.  Rosabeth Moss Kanter notwithstanding, most elephants don’t learn to dance — they get replaced by more terpsichorean others.

Or maybe we just have a lot of crystal balls, each of them providing one glimpse of a possible future.

When I started as a “writer/instructor” with Amtrak, training ruled the corporate instructional world.  Except where psychomotor skills dominated (the actual operation of an airplane, say), the primary model involved:

• A body of knowledge, out there somewhere
• People who had to “acquire” that knowledge
• Various strategies and tactics for making that acquisition happen

Not all the strategies, and certainly not all the tactics, were optimal.  Still, people could and did learn — meaning, they started off unable to do a job, and ended up able to do it.

Gradually, though, the emphasis in how to develop training shifted — especially as some practitioners noticed that you don’t actually have to “train” (as in, “get people to memorize”) every part of every task.  This is where real instructional design started to matter.  If you alter your focus and work backwards from the performance you’re looking for, you can find strategies and tactics that don’t depend on repeating high school throughout a person’s working life.

In other words, it’s not do X and Y and Z in order to evaluate bank loan applications.  Instead, it’s here are the criteria for an acceptable loan, and here are ways to go about applying those criteria.  Which in turn meant “use this job aid” (or this online wizard) instead of “memorize these 37 factors.”

Joe Harless, among many others, saw that there are only two places to store knowledge (inside your head, or outside of it).  Storing inside (whether you call it learning or memorizing) is almost always costlier.

That stage still had a heavy emphasis on “body of knowledge;” it just connected the knowledge more clearly to the desired results.

Around the same time, but in a wider orbit, people like Geary Rummler, Dale Brethower, and Robert Mager (among many, many others) began taking a systems approach.  How a person (or a group) performs on the job depends on many things besides skill and knowledge.  A lot of this stuff has nothing to do with training, and a good part of it has nothing to do with learning, so far as the individual or group is concerned.

Performance improvement can be a much harder sell in an organization.  It’s not as tidy and easily understood as “11,000 student-days in the last six months” or “an average score of 85% on the ‘Basics of EDI’ online course.” The potential payoff is huge, especially when the group itself begins analyzing and problem-solving systematically.

There’s a parallel with things like Six Sigma, which in one company can re-energize while in another company becomes just the official religion (till the next one shows up).

Now we’re in the early stages of a new way of affecting performance on the job.  I’m still skeptical that most people can are willing, let alone ready, to take charge of their own learning.  I’m more skeptical that they can do that in concert with their peers in large or complex organizations.

I do agree with Harold that organizations may be moving from a performance-improvement approach to a “connecting and facilitating one.”  (Though I have to say that an awful lot of organizations I’ve seen would be doing very well to start thinking about performance improvement instead of butts-in-seats and LMS-hours-per-employee.)

Harold, Michele Martin, and Tony Karrer have put together Work Literacy’s Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals.  I think of it as usefully chaotic; it’s a site where people interested in various implications of 2.0 can find out more, discover people with experience or people with similar interests.

I don’t know whether that approach could easily transfer to areas of performance with high risk — where compliance with standards or outside regulations is mandatory, for example, or where the consequence of error is significant. Nor where stuff is just plain complex.

I’m not saying it can’t.  I’m saying I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone else does.  We’re in a period of learning, which means interacting with the outside world and experiencing some stress.  The feedback from that interaction causes physical change in a person’s brain, and those physical changes lead to… learning.

There isn’t an either-or answer, and it’s foolish to seek one.  Straightforward, near-transfer, procedural stuff — how to operate the home-makeover software to help the home store customer plan a remodeling, say — fits very well into what looks like “training” to the average person.

Call it “informed learning support.”  Some basic terminology here, some concepts there, a suggested series of exercises there.  Connect with others at roughly your level?  Sure.  Involve more experienced people (who’ve perhaps been coached to encourage you to experiment and even fall short before they give you more explicit help)?  You got it.

Most people don’t want to stumble around in the basics.  If they don’t know anything, they’d like to get quickly to where they do know something, so they can try to do something.  The factory learning model doesn’t fit every situation, but neither does everyone want to build his own auto engine, let alone smelt the steel to make it with.

Photo of balls in crystal by David Reese.

Wendy Wickham, In the Middle of the Curve, has derailed my morning with her current dilemma.  In her post, “Teaching People to Fish,” she talks about her challenge: people within and outside her department wanting to “convert their 100+ slide, information-heavy PowerPoints into 100+ slide, information-heavy Captivate projects.”

So they can put the on the LMS.  So people can learn.

(When I say I got derailed, I mean I found Wendy’s dilemma so compelling that I pushed other stuff aside.  She didn’t throw the switch and isn’t responsible, except insofar as her problem resonated with me.)

She asks for thoughts from her readers.  Mine ricochet all over the place (maybe I need to edit?), so I’m scribbling here on my own whiteboard rather than cluttering up her comments.  No particular order, and no particular value to any of my thoughts:

Wendy says that “having hundreds of dull click-to-death tutorials sullying my LMS makes me more than a little crazy.”  Sadly, this is Gresham’s Law, applied to training: bad courseware drives out good.  Sooner or later, though, you’re not in control of the LMS.  It’s natural to take pride and feel ownership — my password in an early system I managed was “tsar.”  My hunch is that someone can tell you to put the stuff in, though, so accept what you can’t change and work on what you can.

Among the things she thinks need to happen:

• Making the subject-matter experts more independent, which probably includes…
• Teaching them how to use Captivate, as well as…
• Developing a support system beyond ‘call the help desk” or “here’s my card.”

Wendy has no illusions that she can move people from drown-them-with-detail to “fully-realized game with important decisions” instantaneously (or, if you ask me, this year).

What do I think would help?  Wouldn’t it be great if the subject-matter experts came to accept a few concepts like:

1. Talking isn’t training; listening isn’t learning.
2. The key question isn’t “what should they know?” but “what should they do?”
3. Give meaning before details.
4. “Bear with me” means “I’m talking too much.”

I see several ways to approach this.  For subject-matter experts who are genuinely interested in having people learn, a copy of Bob Mager’s What Every Manager Should Know about Training is worth at least two weeks of workshops from ASTD or ISPI.  Mager smuggled performance improvement into your consciousness in his trademarked readable style.  If you can’t read its 139 pages inside of three hours, your lips are moving.

In one-on-one settings, you might try asking the expert (regarding a deluge of 100 PowerPoint slides): “Is this how you learn?”  (The follow-up questions are, “Is this really how you learn?” and “Tell me what you’ve learned this way.”)

Still, that’s theory.  What about the practice?  The ideal to me is to demonstrate the sense and the effectiveness of a different approach.

I’m leery of the curse of recursion, so in a course on Captivate, my sample topic would not be “how to use Captivate.”  (See how confusing that gets?  I mean, in my how-to-use Captivate course, the examples would not be from a make-believe course in how to use Captivate.)  Whatever my topic — one technical enough for an expert to admit it was technical — I’d combine the near-transfer details of using Captivate with the far-transfer challenge of instructional design.

In fact, that may be a fruitful path.  The late Ron Zemke of Training magazine wrote a series of articles he called “bluffer’s guides.” While he pretended that what he wrote was not nearly enough about the topic (producing training videos, managing computer-based instruction), his real purpose was to communicate useful principles by example.

So, some things I might try in The Bluffer’s Guide to Effective Training:

• Offload excess detail and nice-to-know material.  I’d include hyperlinks under titles like “for more about Product X” or “Examples of Process Y.”
• Explain when to use job aids, and give examples of them.  The idea here is that you store the skill or knowledge in the job aid; the training gives practice in applying the job aid.  Less time to develop, faster results, less cognitive load.  (Works great, less filling.)
• Articulate and apply rules for effective presentations.  This one based on John Medina’s Brain Rules is on the lengthy side (132 slides) but not exactly death by PowerPoint.

Depending on the experts, you might even whip up a guide to help them clarify the outcomes they want their training to have.  An online guide, with decision support taking the form of options that someone clicks to explore alternatives or see examples.

Earlier this year, I had to make a presentation on a relatively dry topic.  I challenged myself to make extensive use of visuals, and to minimize the textual information.  Creating it probably took me three times longer than a more traditional presentation would have (I’m an analytical, text-ophilic guy.)

That’s another point to convey to the experts: working in a new way (whether you’re trying to master Captivate, or creating your first web menus using CSS) is tough. As Bill Deterline said, things take longer than they do.  The question as always is, what’s the outcome?

(If you’ve got other ideas, I’m sure Wendy will welcome them.)

Photo of a whale shark (among many other seagoing experts) at the Churaumi Aquarium by Dolmang / SJ Yang.