MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Revolution warning for Florida: Traveling to Suncoast Regional User Conference

Next Thursday, May 8th, is the MindLeaders Suncoast Regional User Conference in St. Leo, Florida. I'm going to be one of the presenters: I'll be speaking about ROI ("Evaluation is the horse, the training program is the cart"), employee development ("This presentation is yet to be named"), and running a fun interactive discussion about training helps and hindrances called "Force Fields."

We also have some great discussions planned about training best practices, marketing your training program, and some old-fashioned networking and hobnobbing with fellow learning professionals. There's no charge for the conference. If you're in the Florida area (or even if you're not) and would like to join the conference, it's not too late to sign up. Drop a line to me (BGriese at mindleaders.com) or your MindLeaders account manager/contact.

How to work with IT departments on new technology training

The cover article in this week's issue of Computerworld is "IT's Top Five Training Mistakes."  (This link is currently returning an error on Computerworld's web site, but hopefully they'll have it fixed soon.) For those of us in the training field, it's mostly a "No kidding, Sherlock," return to the basics, but it's an interesting five-minute walk in IT's shoes, especially if your IT department handles some of their own training.

The article's top five mistakes are:

1. Training is an afterthought.
2. You're out of tune with your audience.
3. You didn't follow standard training models.
4. You're training out of business context.
5. You neglected to forge business partnerships.

The story gives lots of due credit to the training professionals that are hopefully in place in IT departments and their companies. If you're one of those pros, this article might give you a nice touchstone with the folks who are planning new software rollouts. The article advises the IT folks multiple times to come talk to their trainers, but the mountain can also go to Muhammad: maybe this will give you some ideas on the things your IT people need to hear and/or might respond to the most.

What lessons have you learned during new hardware or software rollouts in your organization? How did the coordination with IT/MIS go?

Is Boomer retirement as scary as it seems?

To go with my previous article about Baby Boomer retirement, here's the monkey wrench I'm going to toss at Conventional Wisdom: is the sky really falling? Is a massive Baby Boomer retirement really about to cause a huge gap in workers? According to the US Census Bureau, here are the 2006 percentages of population by age group:

Birth Years	%age of population
1991-1987	7.2%
1986-1982	7%
1981-1977	6.8%
1976-1972	7.1%
1966-1962	7.6%
1961-1957	7.6%
1956-1952	6.8%
1951-1947	6%
1946-1942	4.5%

Baby Boomers, from 1946-1964, account for about 28.7% of the population
Generation X, from 1965-1982, are 17.7% of the population
Generation Y, from 1980-1994, hold at least 14.2% of the population, with more yet to count

That does look panic-inducing-ly out of balance on the face of it. But this was the first time I really paid attention to the years. The exact years that define "generations" are constantly being debated, but taking these as approximates, boomers span 18 years, X covers 7 years, Ys 14 years. Boomers cover many more years, so it's almost expected that there's more of them.

Broken into five-year pieces like this chart, the rate of workers reaching retirement age twitches up 1.5% between the 64-year-olds (1946-1942) and the 59-year-olds (1951-1947), and then holds fairly steady. It's an increase, but is it really that much?

I'm not suggesting that many organizations won't see a lot of retirements in the next few years. But I am suggesting that boomers are going to retire gradually, over that same 18-year-span (and more!) that they entered the workforce, and that we have adequate incoming people to cover those retirements. What I'm suggesting is that we clarify the focus of the baby boomer retirement discussion: is the problem less in the number of workers that we have, and more about the change in mindsets and experiences of the workers? I think the departure of the Baby Boomers and the arrival of Generation Y don't require radical changes in our knowledge management and training programs, but it will put more focus on them than there used to be and make us all sharpen up our game.

Who will work after the Baby Boomers?

Much kerfuffle is going on these days about the baby boomer retirement, and how we will fill those positions. The LA Times put this on the front page today with a story about the upcoming needs for skilled workers.

Generation Y is usually mentioned hand-in-hand with the baby boomer retirement, the baby boomer echo that is bringing lots of new people into the workforce. This LA Times article focused on a point I hadn't considered before, that the influx of immigrants can also serve as a new pool of workers to fill in as the baby boomers retire.

In either case, the main point for the training community is the same: lots of new workers are coming, whether young or from other countries (or both!), that are looking to join the workforce and build careers. Their needs will be slightly different, but with the same focus on building up the business skills they'll need to hit the workforce running. Maybe instead of focusing on retirements, as trainers, we should be focused on the orientations and office skills we'll be teaching.

Doing some research for this blog post stirred up some interesting statistics - I'll share those in my next post.

How to Get Excellent Data on Learning Tool Usage

The eLearning Guild sent me a notice about a report that they've produced on the usage levels of various learning methods - instructor-led training, e-learning, mentoring, blogs, podcasts, you name it.

The report was really just a lot of screen shots of the tool that's constantly available on their web site, but it was the perfect reminder to me to do some diving into that tool. If, like me, you haven't visited in a while, or you've never been, check them out: http://www.elearningguild.com/360_reports/.

These reports give you real-time results on the surveys of all guild members about their learning tool usage. You can parse that data out by industry, company size, region, and more. It's an excellent way to take a look at how your company's training programs compare to the world at large or in your sector, to see how your blend of training compares with the recipes that others have come up with.

Strengthening Your Human Infrastructure

The 4-day GTC West 2008- The Conference on California's Future convenes May 12-16 at the Sacramento Convention Center. GTC West is the largest technology expo for government professionals in California. It exposes the government sector to the thousands of offerings of hundreds of vendors in key-concern areas including; health & human services, public safety, transportation, 'Green' California initiatives and education.

MindLeaders has served local and state governments for 27 years with e-Learning and organizational development programs that yield measurable savings and returns-on-investment. We help government clients administer and promote their learning and training agendas with the same centralized, turnkey administration platform, marketing support and up-to-date courseware library that our private sector clients enjoy.

We'll be in attendance in the exhibit hall along the 'Education Place' aisle, Booth #505. The theme of our booth presentation is, "Strengthening Your Human Infrastructure". Stop by and visit us! Conference details may be seen at www.cal-future.com or email Joe Moscato or Eben Beierle at MindLeaders.

Recalling Our Not-so-Distant Past

Where would your e-Learning program be, today, if not for the Internet? Imagine the frustration that would be visited upon your company if it was suddenly reliant (again) on local data networks, mainframes and physically distributed media for executing its training, learning and organizational development initiatives! Technology has advanced at such a blinding pace that we’re at risk of losing sight of just how recently theses profound advances have come.

Earlier this month, The Science Channel premiered a 4-part documentary, Download: The True Story of the Internet. The series is scheduled for rebroadcast (2 episodes per date) on April 5 & 6.

The series is hosted by John Heilemann who covered the meteoric rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web as a Silicon Valley columnist for Wired magazine. You might also recognize John for his current reporting of the 2008 national presidential races for New York magazine. Below, we’re publishing the Science Channel’s synopsis of the series:

Download: The True Story of the Internet is about a revolution -- the technological, cultural, commercial and social revolution that has radically changed our lives.

And for the first time on television, we hear how it happened from the men and women who made it possible.

From the founders of eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, Netscape, Google and many others, we hear amazing stories of how, in ten short years, the Internet took over our lives. These extraordinary men and women tell us how they went from being geeky, computer obsessed nerds to being 21st-century visionaries in the time it takes most people to get their first promotion. And, how they made untold billions along the way.

The style of the story-telling is up close and personal. With first-hand testimony from the people that matter, we tell a story that has all the excitement of a thriller -- full of battles and back-stabbing, moments of genius and moments of sheer hilarity. You will never surf the net in the same way again.

Download is hosted by technology journalist John Heilemann. He's an edgy, combative, hi-energy New Yorker who never takes anything at face value. He's also a personal friend of most of Silicon Valley's most important characters and he revels in craziness of it all. After all, this is a story in which 20-year-olds become overnight billionaires, create, destroy and re-create more wealth in ten years than the human race has ever seen.

http://science.discovery.com/tv/download/download.html

The effect of web standards and Internet Explorer on e-Learning

Does your online training follow web standards, or Internet Explorer standards? Currently, if you're building something for the web, you have to make that choice. Internet Explorer does not follow the same web standards that Firefox, Macintosh Safari, and other browsers use.

Internet Explorer, by most current counts, holds somewhere around 75-83% of the browser market. That number is probably even higher among corporations, which tend to frown on their people wandering to other software packages on their systems.

At MindLeaders, we know these numbers and watch them closely. Our courses are built in such a way that can't use both the open web standards and the Internet Explorer-specific standards. With as much market share as Internet Explorer holds, we choose to build our courses for IE. We sure feel for - and do hear from! - that 17-25% of people who prefer other browsers.

Microsoft made a big announcement this month: Internet Explorer 8, which released its first beta on March 5, will conform to the same web standards that almost everybody else is using. I'm posting about it for two reasons:

• MindLeaders' courses will continue to work in IE8 when it's released. There are some codes we can use so that Internet Explorer 8 will display our courses using the old IE standards. In the bigger picture, this means that we can begin (we're in the figuring-it-all-out stage now) to build our courses in web standards that will be accessible from all standards-compliant browsers. It won't happen right away, but it will be a cool day when it does!

• This Internet Explorer change means that everyone will need to take the same hard look at any online web materials they've built to see if it's currently Internet Explorer-specific. Are there any changes you'll need to consider for your web-based learning?

No release date has been announced for IE 8 yet, but a second, wider beta is expected in the summer.

How to implement 360-degree training evaluation

I was reading articles today, including one about handling receiving 360-degree feedback. I started thinking about how that would apply to training programs.

In training, our feedback is usually done through evaluations. Most often, we use smile sheets/end-of-course forms to get immediate feedback.

According to the principles of 360-degree feedback, in order to get a complete picture of our training program's performance, we must widen that scope. We need feedback from the students, but we also need feedback from:

• The students' managers, to asses impact on the job
• The students' subordinates (if the class was about leadership or management)
• Other trainers in the company, to get some peer review

The best way to do this is to do an initial survey after the class, and then to also follow up, just like you do with the student, a month or two down the road to see the effects that the training program has had once it's gone into the wild.

The biggest challenge with ideal feedback/evaluation implementation is follow-through, keeping up with all the different surveys and follow-ups that need to be done on all the different training programs that are running.

An annual or semi-annual survey might be the simplest way to cover all those bases. The survey could ask some evergreen questions about training needs within your audience, and then also follow up on each of the training programs that have been run since the last survey to ask for feedback from anyone who has seen an impact or has thoughts/suggestions about them.

What do you do to help keep the evaluation ball rolling? Who else could you involve in your evaluations to wide the angle closer to 360 degrees?

It's course release day at MindLeaders!

MindLeaders has released a whopping 186 new courses today! We're in the midst of a big push for the first half of 2008 to cover a huge number of certifications. And that's in addition to our Office 2007 coverage and our latest business skills series on Communicating with Power and Project Management from a People Perspective.

Our development department is looking a little shell-shocked, but they sure have the goods to show for it!

• Cisco Related Series by MindLeaders CCDA 640-863
• Cisco Related Series by MindLeaders CCNA 640-802
• Cisco Related Series by MindLeaders ICND1 640-822
• Cisco Related Series by MindLeaders ICND2 640-816
• Communicating with Power
• CompTIA A+ Depot Technician 220-604
• CompTIA A+ Essentials 220-601
• CompTIA A+ IT Technician 220-602
• CompTIA A+ Remote Support Technician 220-603
• ITIL Version 2 Foundation Certificate EX0-100
• Java 2 5.0 Programmer Certification 310-055
• Microsoft .NET 2.0 Distributed Apps MCTS 70-529
• Microsoft .NET 2.0 Web Development MCTS 70-528
• Microsoft .NET 2.0 Windows Development MCTS 70-526
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 MCTS 70-236
• Microsoft Office Project 2007 MCTS 70-632
• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 MCTS 70-630
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Admin MCITP 70-444
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Data Access MCITP 70-442
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Design MCITP 70-443
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Solutions MCITP 70-441
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Upgrade MCITP 70-447
• Oracle 10g Database Administration II 1Z0-043
• Oracle9i Database Fundamentals II 1Z0-032
• Oracle9i Database Performance Tuning 1Z0-033
• Outlook 2007
• PowerPoint 2007
• Project Management from a People Perspective
• SharePoint 2007
• Windows Vista Configuration MCTS 70-620

To see what else is on the horizon, drop by our development schedule. And as always, we love to hear any suggestions and requests for your top training needs; drop a line to your account executive, in a course evaluation, or in a comment on this blog.