(This is part one of a three part series. Parts two and three will appear on Wednesday and Friday.)

The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you. -B. B. King

We’ve all been to training. More specifically, we’ve all been in training where we were bored to tears, not because we were already experts, but because there was just no connection between our individual learning style, base knowledge, interest level, or job goals and whatever it was the instructor was doing. Invariably, however, there will be a few people in the same class who feel this training was the best they’ve ever attended. Two days later, you can’t even remember what the course was about and two months later others are still quoting the instructor. Why does this seem to happen so often? In my experience, that it was effective even for those few people was probably just luck.

When you’re thinking of making or commissioning some technical training, stop. Completely. Not one of those rolling stops you do at a stop sign in the middle of nowhere. Sit down and take a deep breath. Now, write three complete sentences:

• “This training is appropriate for people who…???
• “In this training, you will learn how to…???
• “After this training, you will be able to…???

If you cannot specifically and succinctly define your audience, tell them what they will learn, and describe how their new ability will benefit the organization, you’re definitely not ready to start building training. This would be just like writing code without requirements and you’re likely to achieve the same spectacular lack of success.

If you need to do a formal performance needs assessment to get requirements because you’re teaching someone a life-or-death skill (e.g., how to disarm landmines in the field), then do it. On the other hand, if you’re teaching employees the basics of physical security for the average office building, you can probably just survey the existing literature to get your main points.

I understand that there is some training that must be given to everyone regardless of their interest, skill level, learning style, or anything else. Examples might include employee orientation training, sexual harassment training, security procedures training, and so on. I feel it’s easy to show how poorly the average one-size-fits-all training approach has worked in these areas, especially when reduced to a poorly-scripted eLearning module or abysmally-acted short film.

Even after you get a good course description and, presumably, the right audience, tell people right up front what they’re going to learn in your course. Don’t make it something cheesy like “Today we’re going to learn about software security.??? That’s just silly, even if it’s for a general software security course. Tell them something useful like “Today, I’m going to show you how to generate crypto seed values correctly in various languages and technology stacks. By doing this correctly, you will help the company meet ongoing regulatory compliance requirements.??? If it is the general course, tell them something like “Today, I’m going to give 10 reasons to care about software security and help save millions of dollars.???

Well, that’s different. Now I know why I’m here and how what I’m going to learn will really help; it’s not just some flavor-of-the-month exercise because it’s “time to shake things up around here.??? Continually reinforcing why this training is important, both during the class and afterwards, means you’ll end up not only with increased competence in the target audience, but, in this case, you’ll also end up with practitioners who are more business-risk aware. That’s a good thing. Why? Because now, they’ll ask themselves questions about “How does this affect the business???? and, when they don’t know the answer, they’ll go ask someone rather than just putting some code together. Give them the chance to do the right thing.

Remember, it is a significant task to get a diverse group of people to leave a room with the basics of a new skill (e.g., developers using certificates for mutual application authentication), with necessary knowledge (rand() is not cryptographically secure), or even with just a common awareness of a given problem (e.g., web application input validation is tricky). This is compounded when we let training creation wait until the last minute and then “throw something together??? or we “just use last year’s slides.???

The biggest evidence of such procrastination and lack of planning is ending up with training materials (e.g., PowerPoint slides) that are simply about the topic, not on how to do the topic. How often have you gone to a class guaranteeing to turn you into a practitioner, only to spend the majority of the time on vocabulary and concepts and fluffy cloud process diagrams! What a waste of time. Training about test process automation, for example, is something that you give to people making budgeting and resourcing decisions. Training detailing a method for doing test process automation is what you deliver to practitioners.

Speaking of planning, in my experience you have to budget about 100 minutes per technical information slide to create useful material that focuses on imparting a single important idea in a memorable fashion. This includes sufficient time for instructor and student notes. The instructor notes should be what the instructor says while the slide is being projected, along with any prompts for what to do, what to hand out, and so on. The student notes should include specific reinforcements, references, and related materials applicable to the information on the slide. This 100-minute block also includes internal review, discussion, and bootstrapping the first instructor.

I know 100 minutes per slide sounds like a lot, but if you’re spending less than three days to plan, draft, and complete one hour (about 15-20 information slides) of technical training (or any training that is telling someone how to do something), you’re probably messing it up. In particular, take the time to look for every group of words, bullets, or slides that you can turn into a real, accurate picture. Decorate the picture appropriately, but don’t make it so busy that it becomes an eye chart. Animate it whenever necessary to show how and when things actually happen. People will remember and refer to these pictures (because they can cut and paste them), but they probably won’t ever reuse some random set of bullet points.

This reuse habit, by the way, is also why it is universally idiotic to include on-the-fly sample code that someone just banged out for the slide; it’s almost certainly wrong, not secure, and against some policy and someone will be embedding it in some critical code module tomorrow. If they do that, it’s just as much your fault as it is theirs.

Another word of advice: Don’t have technical experts create the final training product. No, really. Even if you’re the technical expert and you think you know better. Trust me. The only exception to this might be when a technical expert is creating slides for very similar technical experts. Even then, run the slides by someone a level or two below and a level or two above “technical expert,??? as well as someone more skilled in training presentation, and heed their feedback. It’ll be a valuable experience and you’ll end up with better material that is less bogged down with jargon, with incomplete thoughts that presume too much historical knowledge, with acronyms that are never explained, and with words that apparently have a different definition on the author’s home planet. One hopes you’ll also end up with something that isn’t 100 slides of wall-to-wall words.

The long-term benefits derived from putting the required time and skill into building good training will far exceed the initial investment. Spend a little extra time on it and make your students happy to be there. Everyone will benefit.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 11:15 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.