Guess who's going to be a trainer?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I had a chat with my manager today and he wants to expand my role here at work (he's always wanted to but now seems to be a good time since I've been around over 2 months and have gotten my feet wet).

One of the roles would be to create and provide training for our new product to tech support, sales engineers, and so forth. My predecessor left a few books behind that I could use for resources but I wanted to get opinions from the folks here. The books I have immediate access to are:

Turning Training into Learning

Developing Training Courses

I haven't actually cracked the covers yet because I've been doing some of the other projects I've been tasked with. I'm not a trainer by trade so I'm sure I can use all of the advice and suggestions you have to offer. Thanks in advance.

-Trip

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I can't offer any advice in that department, but I can offer my congratulations it sounds like things a going well for you.

Good luck.

 

As a former automotive trainer for GM, I always thought you were a shoe-in for this kind of thing, Trip. You have an ability to bridge the gap between technical jargon and laymen's terms, a credit to any technical writer. One thing, though -- as a former technician as well, I was intimately knowledgeable about what the average techs knew, and what they needed to learn. That, in itself, allowed me to write my own curriculum based loosely around what they wanted me to teach them. In short: Know your audience.

Still, the biggest challenge for any instructor is keeping the audience engaged, without being the spotlight yourself. Although its a bit like performing, finding interesting ways to present the material allows for the creatively gifted to 'stretch out'. Obviously, a solid foundation is necessary, and any labs need to be gone over six ways to Sunday. My guys could pick out a mistake like shooting fish in a barrel, so being humble in mistakes is often a good thing. I usually made the point that there stands an excellent chance both the class and *I* will learn something. That happened quit a bit, actually, but always ended cool. If you come off like a know-it-all, you'll get sliced and diced-- but with your geniality, I doubt you'll experience that.

A bit of 'unexpectedness' always helped to -- I often used Hendrix (through my laptop) blasting out of a pair of hidden speakers as an icebreaker. Then, a bit of bs'ing to lighten things up. After that, its all business

EDIT: It helps to have a mentor to learn from too, even if its just sitting through a class or two. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, right?

 

Major congrats, man!

 

Congrats Trip! Being a trainer now for 18 years, if I can help, just shout.

 

Since my predecessor had these training books, I'm going to search through her old files to see if she created any classes. The product I'll be expected to train to is new, but it would be nice to find a general template for what's expected. I'll keep you posted.

 

Congratulations

 

Like GBL I'm not able to give any advice... but I can add my congratulations... it really sounds like your employers appreciate the work that you do (wish I could say the same thing about mine). You'll make a very good trainer indeed.

 

It's really interesting because I can't often tell what my manager thinks of my work and it drives me crazy. It's moments like these that help reaffirm that I might actually have a future at this place. Everyone's getting ready for Lotusphere and they're going crazy trying to get the new product up to snuff to demo there. My manager is in Seattle right now and week after next, all the big and medium-sized wigs will be gone. Hopefully, things will calm down enough to where I can work more on the training piece and my other new role...installing and testing the new nightly builds of the server-side appliance (I still have to work out the details of which server to use, etc...).

 

Major congrats Trip...

 

Good news and congrats

 

Trip, I am glad to hear the great news. Major congrats.

 

Congratulations trip. This sounds like a really great opportunity.

 

Congratulations on the good news Buddy!

I am looking at the training side myself - but I have to give up the security of a GOV job to do it.

As I am married with 4 young children this is a cause for concern.

 

Well done Trip!

A question though: Have you ever used Adobe Captivate ?

It might be out of context here, depending on your situation, but that is one great piece of tutoring software.