Ever enrolled in instructional design certifications and elearning classes but you still feel that there are a few things missing? Maybe this can help you.
Thanks to Ken Ronkowitz for posting this on Facebook. When I read this, I thought it did explain a lot of tools that are needed, and where there are gaps. One of my first blog posts here on TechCommGeekMom was about how I didn’t have access to the tools to put to practice much of what I had learned on a foundational basis. Between experience and education, I had most of the abstract tools needed to become an instructional designer, but evidently not enough of the physical tools described (although I had most of them). The other problem, which I’ve mentioned many times before is that even getting all or most of these skills in takes time, and even once you have them, there’s no such thing as an entry-level instructional designer position. Believe me, I looked for four or five years and gave up. It’s not that what is being outlined here is unreasonable, but gaining the knowledge outlined here still takes a lot of time and effort that yes, a certificate isn’t going to necessarily teach you.
Since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007, the history major has lost significant market share in academia, declining from 2.2% of all undergraduate degrees to 1.7%. The graduating class of 2014, the most recent for which there are national data, included 9% fewer history majors than the previous year’s cohort, compounding a 2.8% decrease the year before that. The drop is most pronounced at large research universities and prestigious liberal arts colleges.
This is an article that an acquaintance of mine had posted on Facebook, and it stands to make another positive argument in favor of history majors (like me). I’ve said many times that I was not suited to do a traditional English or Journalism major because I really didn’t want to get bogged down in literature–not that literature is problematic, but it’s not for me. Whereas understanding the finer details of grammar, and doing the research…ah, that’s where a history major’s strengths come into play, and help make better technical communicators.
Read this article, and tell me what you think in the comments below.
I felt like a superhero and could conquer the world–what happened?
I apologize for being absent for so long, and only sharing curated content for the last few months. There have been a lot of changes, and there’s still some transitioning going on, so keeping up with a blog hasn’t been that easy to do.
Even so, it’s a time when I’ve recently been doing a lot of soul searching with regards to my career. It’s take some unexpected turns in the last few months since my long-term contract ended in July. Some of it good, some of it not as good, but all have been learning experiences not only in learning something new, but learning something about myself.
I’ve been reflecting on several jobs I’ve had over the years, and looking at patterns of where things went right, and where things went wrong. Not being so young anymore, I have a certain perspective now that I wouldn’t have had even just a few years ago. I guess with age does come wisdom. I’ve also started to figure out what I want–and don’t want–from my career.
I’ll give you an example of a common pattern that’s happened in my career. I would take a job or an assignment because I needed the money and/or had a certain set of expectations that the experience would help my career. When none of the expectations of that position would have been met, deep frustration would set in, which would yield to depression and feeling stuck. I would be asked to bring certain skills, and was hired due to those skills, but then those skills wouldn’t be used. I would end up trapped in doing something that I could do well, or at least passably, but not something I wanted to do. This has happened several times, and I question why I get stuck in that kind of situation so frequently.
I thought of a job analogy that might explain this differently. Imagine that you had gone to culinary school to become a trained chef . So, as a chef, you are hired at a restaurant to work in the kitchen in a chef role for your cooking skills, and you’re fine with doing salad duty to work your way up, as long as cooking is involved, because that’s your passion and training. But for some reason, the owner has you left out of the kitchen to wait on tables for a while because it will help you understand your patrons. You go along with it for a little while, with the hope that you’ll get to that salad chopping soon. Soon, it becomes apparent that the owner has you, a chef, waiting on tables permanently. It’s not that you don’t have the ability to wait tables, but it’s not what you were hired to do, and it’s not strength. Subsequently, you get upset because the training and expertise is being wasted, and you feel like you were misled, because the job completely changed from the job description given at the time of the application and interview.
Like I said, I’ve had this happen to me several times over the years, and right now, I often feel like I’ve fallen into that “chef” role described above. The difference is that I’m a technical communicator, and what I “cook” is different. I know there are certain things that I do very well. I know I’m a capable person, but I also recognize my weaknesses. I also know what I don’t want to do. Becoming a technical communicator in my late forties has been the making of a second career. I know I’m still working my way up and gaining experience, but I have prior experience, too. At my age, I’m getting to a point that I’m financially secure enough that I don’t have to keep a job for financial security as much as when I was young, but I do need to like what I’m doing and have a steady, fair-paying income.
This thought process lead me to thinking about what makes an ideal job–whether you are a technical communicator, or have any kind of job, for that matter. I’ve concluded that what makes or breaks your contentment with a job is having the feeling of being valued. The positions where I learned and grew the most, and where I was generally happiest were at jobs where I felt like I was valued for my skills, my insights, and my opinions. Most often, all I wanted was for my voice to be heard and considered, not heard and pushed aside. I can accept if there’s a valid reason why my idea is not a good one, but “that doesn’t work,” or “that’s not how we do it,” or “everyone’s used to that, so why change it?” doesn’t sit with me too well most of the time. They seem like childish responses. I like to show that I can do the work, and do it well or beyond expectations. I try to push limits where I can, because it helps everyone grow and progress. There was a point in my career when I got accustomed to being dismissed for proposing any ideas or solutions, and so I accepted that my ideas or opinions weren’t valued at all. I lost my “voice” for a very long time. But in recent years, I was invited to use my voice, and as a result, I roared! I grew as a person, because I felt valued because I could contribute some good ideas, even if there were ideas that weren’t used.
But lately, I’ve been unbalanced in what I’ve been working on, and I’ve let that get to me profoundly. I question whether I’m on the right track to be doing something that uses my skills the right way and makes me feel valued. My confidence has been compromised, and it’s a truly awful feeling that I don’t want taking over my life.
At some point, I’ll feel like I’m flying high again.
As I continue this soul searching process, it brings me to the question of what makes me a valuable technical communicator? What is it that I do so well that some people appreciate it, and others not as much? What do I need to do to bring out the best worker in me? What do I need to do to grow and help myself create new opportunities while providing the valuable know-how I already possess?
I am curious as to what other technical communicators think, based on their experiences. I know of several technical communicators who are also in flux with their careers as well–between jobs or having taken new jobs recently. The technical communications field is not an easy one, as it is rife with both short and long-term contracts, people who don’t understand what the value of tech comm as a whole is, and situations where people don’t understand how to best utilize us. What are your experiences? Have you gone through the same roller coaster rides that I’ve been career-wise? What has made your career as a technical communicator worth the past hardships? What do you think is the value of a technical communicator?
Include your comments below! I would really like to hear and share experiences with others.
“What kind of training is this?” “COMPLIANCE TRAINING, SIR!” (Boom-chaka-laka, boom-chaka-laka, boom-chaka-laka, boom!)
I’ve recently taken on a new “adventure” working for a large pharmaceutical company. Now, I’ve worked for pharmaceutical companies before, but it’s been more than 20 years since my last job in the industry. One of the things I’ve been getting bombarded with in the past few weeks is that I have to do a lot of compliance training. This is not the first time I’ve had to do compliance training.
In the last two full-time positions I held, I had to do compliance training in the finance and chemical safety fields, even though my position had nothing to do with the everyday responsibilities of creating and handling chemicals, or handling financial transactions of any kind. But, because of strict regulatory rules on the international, federal, and state levels, I have to do this training. It’s the same with the pharmaceutical field, since that’s yet another highly regulated field.
Now, I will say this much–because of the work that I’ve been hired to do, there actually were several pieces of the compliance courses that applied to me, so that was fine. No matter where you go, especially if you work for a very large corporation, whether you are an employee or contingent worker/consultant (which I always am the latter), you still have to take all these compliance courses regardless of your position in the company to comply with all these regulatory groups. It’s just par for the course.
The information is usually incredibly dry, boring, and lifeless information–at least for me. It’s usually just a course that covers various policies, and you have to pass some sort of quiz to “certify” and help the company be in compliance with these regulatory rules. The courses are usually (but not always, as I’ll explain in a moment) a flat narrative that’s done in Captivate or Articulate, with small little quizzes in between to help you review and retain the information for the final test at the end. Considering that the information is usually so boring, and you may have several hours of it ahead, I usually don’t mind this training because usually there’s a narrator reading the information while showing some images relating to the topic, and it makes it easier for me to remember so I can pass the test.
After having already done four hours of compliance training and passing the test with a 97% (I missed one question) during my first week, I was given additional training that had to be done in the next few days. Of the nine courses I was given to do, only one was an Articulate course (I know it was because the server name in the URL said “articulate.com” in it), and that one made sense, and definitely applied to me.
However, the other eight courses I was given weren’t really courses at all. Since these “courses” were all handled on an LMS (learning management system), I thought I’d be jumping into legitimate courses. I was sadly mistaken. Each of these “courses” was simply the SOP (standard of procedure) policy document that I was expected to read in depth. All these documents were not written in plain English in a user-friendly format. They all were in legal-ese or pharma-talk–or both. This made the process of reading them a little harder for me to digest. Additionally, while there were only two or three documents that were less than ten pages, most were well over twenty pages–even over thirty pages for one or two of the documents. Some documents had a summary at the end, to which I thought, “Why didn’t they just show this at the beginning of the document? Then the rest of it would’ve made sense!” But most did not. With all of these eight documents, there wasn’t any kind of assessment to see if I understood the material. I just had to provide an electronic signature at the end that I read the material.
While I did my best to diligently read the material, it was much worse than dealing with the boring interactive courses. And other than me signing something electronically to say that I had, indeed, read the material, there was no way for the company to know if I understood it. Much of this could’ve easily been short Captivate/Articulate courses that would have not only made the information a tiny bit more interesting, but also there could be a way to assess that there was some semblance of comprehension.
Somewhere along the line, I had read later that in some instances, companies are in compliance as long as they have a policy and that each worker has read the policy and signed off that they read the policy. That sounds easy enough–read the material, and sign that you read it, and you’re done. But is that right?
I thought about this a lot after I finished this second round of compliance training, because reading almost 130 pages of technical jibberish on mostly common sense policies wore me out. I also felt that something was terribly wrong about this procedure. I might not have ended up doing instructional design as I originally set out to do when I started in tech comm (see early posts of TechCommGeekMom), but there were circumstances that bothered me about training employees this way, especially if they had to adhere to regulatory compliance training.
The first thing that came to my head was that as bothersome and boring as they were (sorry, instructional designers), the interactive courses were better. Students could see examples more clearly from images, for example. Or, in my case, seeing images, reading words, and hearing a voice read the technical gobbledygook connected with me better than reading pages and pages and pages of long-winded text. I partially blame my own abilities to learn this way because of my own learning disabilities, but at the same time–am I alone? I’m sure there are some out there who would rather read lots of text to understand information, but I have found that adding multimedia has always made a difference in learning.
I started to wonder if I was an anomaly in finding that I learn better this way. I know there are entire books, courses, and university degrees dedicated to this topic–what’s the best way to teach an adult? Is it any different than teaching a child or youth? Is reading text better than e-learning instances? Is reading text better than having an interactive, multimedia experience? In the case of the documents, I found that I was easily bored by the material to the point that I was more easily distracted, making me only skim the pages rather than read them in great detail after a while–especially with the thirty-page documents. It’s good that the company has policies on specific topics that are available for employees to read, but can employees easily relate to the policy information? How can we ensure that? Is just having them read the policy enough?
To say the least, I was rather disappointed with this method of training of reading text and electronically signing that I completed the reading. My own studies in e-learning made me realize how we are lucky to live in an age where we can make use of voice, images, video, and other multimedia tools that can help enhance the learning process, and in effect, allow learners to better retain the information by making it more relatable–even the boring, compliance information. I’ll bet that I still retain some of the information about financial transaction handling and chemical safety in the inner recesses of my brain because of interactive training. I remember much of what I just learned about drug safety and marketing compliance from my initial training. But what was in those documents. Don’t remember. Not a clue. I think much of it was the same as the stuff in the original compliance training, which also made me question why I had to do it again when I passed that original training. But was reading text and signing effective training? No. Did it fulfill compliance rules? Yes.
Whether it’s this company I’m at, or other companies, having workers understand regulatory compliance policies is important. They are procedures that keep us safe physically and ethically to ensure the best standards for all. So why not take the time to ensure that ALL policies that you feel are important are delivered in a way that helps to insure that employees understand ALL the information? That just seems like common sense to me.
What do you think? What are your experiences with these types of corporate or compliance training? What kind of learning worked best for you? Should companies put a good effort to make all the learning more learning-accessible? Add your comments below!
“Ever hear of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? MORONS!”
Scott Abel recently wrote an article titled, “Why Thought Leaders Aren’t Usually The Best Trainers,” in which he makes a valid point that not all thought leaders who push out books and PowerPoint slides are trainers or teachers. I get that. He backs up his thesis with some facts to support this. And yes, it wouldn’t hurt for those who are thought leaders who haven’t had to go out in the world to present their expertise to learn some fundamentals of teaching/training.
However, I feel Scott has done a disservice here. Sure, I admit I’ve seen some of the thought leaders he’s described, people who are incredibly brilliant and have a lot of great information to share, droning on with dull PowerPoint slides and who don’t know how to present it in a compelling way to actually feel like you learned something. It sounds like much of my entire higher ed education. I’m willing to bet that many of these thought leaders merely wanted to write a book to share knowledge, and didn’t think that they’d end up training people on their methods or data necessarily.
But with method that Scott used to frame his position, I feel like this article is a big slam against half the thought leaders in our industry, simply because they haven’t had those educational fundamentals instilled in them at times or the presentation skills he seeks. In doing this, his commentary implies, in my opinion, that those with the expertise shouldn’t even bother, because without these skills to be a trainer, you’re not worth the time or effort. “Learn to teach/train, or don’t waste my time.” That’s not quite right.
The thing to keep in mind is that understanding different learning styles, etc. takes TIME, as well as trial and error. It’s not something learned in a day, and most thought leaders aren’t going to go back to school to get an education degree. It’s not rocket science either. Budding educators are even given time–a learning curve of their own–to student teach before being sent out to teach. In the corporate world, there is no learning curve before being sent out in the world. You are thrown to the wolves and told, “Okay, you know this, you are an expert on XYZ. GO TRAIN.” This isn’t to say that there aren’t “train the trainer” programs or other resources out there that we can learn from, but I’m willing to bet that more experts are let loose to learn how to train others by trial and error, rather than be guided themselves. At least they go out there and try, which is more than I can say for others.
To understand my perspective, you have to understand that I am an educator’s daughter. My father did some form of teaching either on the high school or university level for over 40 years, and in his spare time, his idea of “fun” was reading books about learning styles and testing the theories on his kids. (Ask me sometime about family vacations at historic cemeteries instead of the beach. 😕) I also have learning disabilities, which provides a different perspective. I have trained others, including those with learning disabilities as well. There is no right or wrong way to teach if the information is learned. Just as there are different learning styles, there are different ways to teach. As long as comprehension is accomplished, then the task has been completed.
I have been a trainer, and still consider myself a trainer. I don’t know how good a trainer I am, but I know I’ve had my successes and failures in teaching people different concepts. I do know that there are many times I have to re-explain a concept to a learner in a different way so that they understand a concept.
In the end, I’ve realized that as a trainer, the process of learning is a two-way communication. As a trainer/teacher, you can present all the facts you want, but if no conversation ensues as a result, then the lesson has failed. At the end of every presentation, workshop, or one-on-on training I’ve ever done, I’ve always invited the students to not only ask questions, but to share their insights or experiences as well. My goal is that students come away with learning something new as well as validating their own knowledge, since I find that to be the best learning for me. It’s a good deal for me as a trainer because I learn how I can explain concepts better to students, as well as gain some new perspectives.
So rather than be a motivating article to spur thought leaders to improve their skills, I thought it was discouraging towards thought leaders. As a community, tech comm should be more pro-active in lifting those thought leaders who have the great ideas into being BETTER teachers. Writing their books is already an effort on their part to teach us, and many write excellent resources. Summoning up the courage to train people on these concepts can be hard enough. I have no disagreement with encouraging those who are going to share their ideas publicly to get some foundational training in how to train and learn how to assess comprehension. But build those budding trainers up, don’t tear them down. Tell them what they did right, but give them constructive criticism. I’m willing to bet that they will appreciate it, and get better over time.
The expression of “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” ran through my head as I read Scott’s article and while writing this post. I always thought that this expression was rather insulting to the many teachers I know. In so many respects, teachers are more capable than those that “do”. But conversely, there are “do-ers” that can’t teach, just as there are teachers that can’t “do”. Scott himself is a university instructor and trainer. Does that mean he can’t do what he lectures about? Of course not. He’s an expert in his field, plus he’s evidentially taken the time over years to learn the most effective ways to teach for his audience. Not everyone makes that same effort, or for that matter, is expected to do that. Thought leaders do need to learn some teaching fundamentals, but we shouldn’t diminish their contributions simply because they aren’t the best trainers.
As I said, as a community, let’s work on raising thought leaders to their fullest potential, which includes encouraging that two-way conversation related to learning, which will help them become better teachers and trainers. After all, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle didn’t have written books or PowerPoint to share their ideas, and they were revered teachers because of discussions. Let’s work on that, instead.
(In the meantime, if you are inspired to improve your training skills, I’m sure there are plenty of resources out there that can help. I think my first stop would be searching through SlideShare to see if there are any pointers out there. I would also watch any video or listen to audio presentations done by those who I think are good trainers, and figure out why I respond to their methods. How was the information presented? What verbal tone did they use? Things like that. Emulate your favorite teachers, because they evidently did something right.)
Ever enrolled in instructional design certifications and elearning classes but you still feel that there are a few things missing? Maybe this can help you.
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