19
Managing the Details: The Effective Administration of Hands‐On Learning
The administrative and logistical tasks required to run an effective hands‐on training program may or may not be part of the duties of the product subject matter expert. Either way, two things are certain: there are many administrative tasks to perform and they are important to the instructor and all training stakeholders.
Technical trainers are often chosen for their technical skills. I’ve established in this book that learning how to teach is a distinct skill that product experts must choose to develop. In much the same way, training administrators are often chosen for their administration skills and forced to learn how to do their jobs as they perform them.
This chapter will not cover how to do the job of a training coordinator or administrator. It will help trainers, however, understand the importance of the administration role and provide clarity regarding its purpose. No training program is complete without the administrative function in place. There are three administrative functions all effective training departments must fulfill (Figure 19.1):
- Measurable. The course and program must be evaluated for effectiveness using industry‐based metrics and feedback.
- Sustainable. The course and program must be repeatable with an established process for review, updates, or relevance.
- Traceable. Records must be retained for reporting attendance, certification, compliance, and/or revenue.
Figure 19.1 Three roles of training administration.
The role itself is not the function of one person. Even if your company has an individual who has the title of training administrator, or training coordinator, the responsibilities belong to trainers and training managers as well.
Measurable
There are many reasons why effective administration is critical to the success of a product training program. Ensuring that a training program or course is properly evaluated is an important influence an administrator has on successful training. The reason the role is so influential is because it is the administrator's role to ensure a regular, systematic, and unbiased evaluation of the course and the program.
You Can’t Improve on What You Haven’t Measured
Said differently, you can’t learn from failures you haven’t noted. In a very real way, the administrator is the quality control director or continuous improvement manager of the training department. Working closely with the trainers, the administrator must keep track of what works and what doesn’t.
Recently, my administrator notified me that we were getting weak evaluation results in one objective of a train‐the‐trainer class I teach. They weren’t bad enough to raise any red flags, so I hadn’t even noticed. She did. She observed that students had less confidence in performing that objective than others. After further scrutiny, I realized that some were misunderstanding one of the exercises I had created. I designed a new exercise and evaluated it separately for a few classes to ensure it was effective. It was, and what was a weakness soon became a strength. Had I not been asking the right questions and measuring the right things, I would have continued to assume I was doing a great job.
Chapter 7 covered some basic requirements for evaluating courses and assessing individuals. But all the assessment in the world is useless if it isn’t acted on. Documenting what is being verified, piloted, or confirmed is critical.
Failure, of course, isn’t a prerequisite to improvement. Good can become better. And it should. Just because you did something well doesn’t mean you don’t want to improve on your success. Find ways to ask the right questions so you can make every class just a little bit better than the last one.
But improvement isn’t the only reason for measuring. Don’t evaluate courses simply to find areas to improve. Track what you are doing well. It is just as important to measure what you are doing right as it is to measure what needs to improve. It is the continuation of what you are doing well that makes measurement bleed over into the important role of sustainability.
Sustainable
A great instructor teaching a great course today does not guarantee success tomorrow. Being a great training department is an iterative process that eventually leads to excellence. Excellence is at the heart of a learning organization. Experts and curriculum designers can invest hours into a learning course or module. It would be forgivable to consider the work finished after the first students have taken the class. Yet no one who has invested that much time wants the course to become irrelevant or outdated shortly after they launch the program. Worse, they don’t want other instructors to teach the class they designed with any less care and determination than they would have put into it.
Controlling training content is important for practical and legal reasons. Content that is designed carefully should not be altered carelessly. It is impractical and a waste of time to have a different version of training on each instructor’s computer. When the content is significantly altered, but offered as the same course, it has potential legal implications. It may become difficult to prove that all instructors are giving students the same opportunities or teaching the same objectives.
There are also financial reasons for ensuring the content is centrally controlled. Industry averages (and my own personal experience) indicate that it takes about forty hours of development for each hour of face‐to‐face training. When trainers alter that content on a whim—to satisfy a personal agenda or preference—it is a waste of time and money. Like the “telephone game” we used to play as children, the content soon gets altered beyond its original intentions and objectives. For these and other reasons all training programs must be repeatable, with an established process for review, updates, and relevance.
You Can’t Repeat Success You Can’t Define
Too many experts recurrently update their product training but don’t track the changes or notify other trainers that they made them. Tracking the changes one makes to an instructor‐led training course is important for consistency and control. Communicating those changes is important for sustainability.
Revision Control
Technical experts are very aware of the need for revision control. In fact, almost everyone today with a smartphone or other electronic devices is at least familiar with the concept of revision control in products. The same type of revision control is required for your curriculum.
Simple Revision Tracking
There are many ways you can choose to number your revisions. Product, language, region, topic, prerequisites, requirements, and even delivery method may be things you want to capture in your numbering (or lettering) system. If you only have a few courses, or are tracking courses only in your department or division, you may choose to keep it simple. Even a simple numbering or lettering system should track three things. It should track changes to the objectives, major content changes, and minor formatting or wording changes (Figure 19.2).
Figure 19.2 Simple revision tracking numbers.
One simple revision control uses a three‐part numbering system. The first number indicates a major change. This should include any changes to the objectives of the course, or any major content changes that you want to record. The second number indicates changes to the content, if the objectives have not changed. It can also include major reformatting, reorganizing, or other significant changes to the curriculum. The third number indicates changes that are minor, though they may be important. This should change when even a slight change is made to the curriculum, including spelling errors and other small changes.
When a major change is incorporated, all of the minor and content changes should be incorporated into those changes. As such, whenever a change is made at the major level, the content and minor level numbers should be reset to zero. Likewise, when a change is made to the content level, the minor level number should be reset to zero, since all of those changes will be included in the content level change (Figure 19.3).
Figure 19.3 Simple revision tracking items.
Having a numbering system is only the beginning. Keep a spreadsheet that lists the changes made to each revision. It is always a good idea to save the actual curricula for each content or major revision. Unless your industry requires it, you probably do not have to save a copy of the revisions with minor changes to them.
Global Enterprise Classification
If you are classifying and tracking the revision of a large, global program, you may want to use a more robust administrative metadata system. Some learning management systems (LMS) can help with revision tracking and even numbering, though most rely on an existing system. The goal of any data filing system is to simplify administration by making logging, retrieving, analysis, and revision easier, faster, and more practical.
If you use the 4 × 8 Proficiency Design Model for designing your courses, using a system like the following one will help with more than just the tracking. It will also help to identify and sort courses based on the criteria than can be tracked in each level (Figure 19.4).
Figure 19.4 Enterprise classification system.
Level 1 (Optional)
The first level of the 4 × 8 Proficiency Design Model covers the business goal and the intended audience. Tracking at this level is optional, but, depending on the size of the organization, may be beneficial. Of the two steps in this first level, it is the target audience that can be designated in numeric form. Both the language and the target audience can be notated. Assign a number to each language you use or translate your courses into. That becomes the first digit (or two if you have more than nine languages) of the first set of numbers.
Some may prefer to use a two‐letter designation for the language. The benefit of that is that it is easier spotted when looking for a particular course. The drawback is that it is not as easy to sort and adds more work if most of your courses are in one or two languages.
Both of these numbers are optional. You may choose to only record levels 2, 3, and 4, depending on the size of your organization or the scope of your classification system.
Level 2
Level 2 represents the objectives of the course. Throughout this book, I have emphasized the importance of clear and actionable objectives. Precise objectives are difficult to package into a filing system. However, when courses are organized or ranked based on their high‐level requirements or other criteria, it makes it easier and practical. Hundred‐level courses may be introductory courses, while 600‐level courses may be reserved for train‐the‐trainer courses. The key is to define the meaning so that the numbers or letters you assign it are practical and valuable.
Level 3
Level 3 of the 4 × 8 Proficiency Design Model has the most steps. They include writing the outline, creating activities to help students learn, and determining how the learning will be delivered. Of these steps, the delivery medium is what should be classified. The simplest way to catalog the medium is to list the three or four ways your company delivers learning and assign it a single‐digit number.
This is also the place to log the length of the class, if this is something you want to track. You can track either the actual hours of the course or the credits awarded, in whole numbers. Put this number prior to the delivery medium number, since it may be more than one digit.
Level 4
Level 4 consists of keeping track of the content. This is the simple tracking used earlier in a three‐digit format at the end of the catalog number;
- Hundreds level. The hundreds‐level number refers to any major or objective changes. Note that if the overall objectives of the course change, the course should be given a new catalog number at level 2. However, if one of the objectives in the courses changes or is adjusted and you want to keep the course title and main purpose the same, this is where to record that change. All of the changes at the tens‐ and ones‐digit level will be incorporated into any changes at this level. As such, whenever a change is made at the hundreds level, the following digits should be reset to zero.
- Tens level. The tens‐level number is for changes made to the content that do not change the objective of the course. If the curriculum is reorganized or something is removed, here is the place to note that change. All of the changes at the ones‐digit level will be incorporated into any changes at this level. As such, whenever a change is made at the tens level, the ones‐digit should be reset to zero.
- Ones level. The ones‐level number is for minor changes. Spelling errors, formatting changes, new exam questions, and many other less significant changes can be noted here.
Using the chart in Figure 19.5, which can be modified as needed for your program, see if you can determine the following from this catalog number: 12.123.41.113.
- What is the language of the course?
- Who is the general target audience?
- At what general level is this course offered?
- What is the course number?
- How many hours is the course?
- What is the course delivery method?
- How many major revisions has the course been through?
- How many content revisions has the course been through?
- How many times has it been updated for minor changes?
Figure 19.5 Sample enterprise classification items.
Using the graph in Figure 19.6, you can see the answers.
- What is the language of the course? English
- Who is the general target audience? New hires
- At what general level is this course offered? Required
- What is the course number? 23
- How many hours is the course? 4 hours
- What is the course delivery method? Instructor‐led
- How many major revisions has the course been through? One
- How many content revisions has the course been through? One
- How many times has it been updated for minor changes? Three
Figure 19.6 Example classification number.
Propose, Approve, Implement
All instructors of any course should have the freedom to propose changes. Each department, and maybe even each course, will have varying rules for approving those changes. Generally, the smaller the change, the fewer approvals will be required. Any instructor, for example, should be able to correct a spelling error or obvious formatting issue. They should be “approved” by notification only. However, changes that significantly alter the content or change the objectives should go through a review and approval process.
Making changes to your curriculum, no matter how wonderful they are, is of little help unless all instructors are notified of the changes. There are many collaboration tools available that can take the drama out of distributing a new curriculum to instructors. Find what works best for you and the size of your department or organization. If there are only a couple of trainers, personal communication may be sufficient. Larger, global organizations may require a more creative means of getting the word out.
The Quarterly Curriculum Review
Many sales departments perform a quarterly business review (QBR) with their employees. It is a chance to learn what is happening and what is important and make sure their numbers are on track. The goal is to give everyone the best opportunity for success.
The same can be helpful, on a smaller scale, with those who teach a particular curriculum. Companies that are serious about maintaining consistency throughout their technical education programs want to make sure that their instructors are on the same page, learn from each other, and have the latest and greatest updates to any curricula.
A quarterly curriculum review (QCR) can provide the best opportunity for technical trainers to succeed. This can be as simple as a conference call or can involve a full review and train‐the‐trainer session. No two QCRs are the same. Unlike QBRs, there may be many quarters without any changes, eliminating the need altogether.
A QCR is an opportunity to look at curriculum that hasn’t been updated in a long time as well. This helps to avoid complacency and verify that your courses are relevant and up to date.
Change is difficult for everyone, even instructors. The advantage of having a QCR is that it allows instructors to voice their concerns or delights in the changes and helps to foster a team spirit. If the proposed changes came from outside the department, it also provides an opportunity to hear why those changes are important.
Oh, and by the way, this is a great time to share your success stories! Be honest, you smiled when you read that comment that you were the best instructor ever. Maybe the smile disappeared when you realized you might be the only person to ever see that comment. Now is your chance to make sure that doesn’t happen. Share it! Encourage yourself and other instructors that the training being delivered is making a difference.
Train the Trainer
Taking time to train instructors on any changes to the curriculum is important. It is also important to create a process that requires verification that an instructor is ready to teach when the alterations to the course are beyond minor adjustments. Administrators should be able to track which instructors have been notified and, if necessary, been trained on the curriculum changes. Well‐meaning instructors can unintentionally block sustainability by over‐modifying their courses until they are unrecognizable from courses others teach. While there should be some room for personalization (I use the 80/20 rule—at least 80% of the course should be standard), most of that should come in the form of delivery, not in development of the curriculum itself. Developing a regular keep‐the‐trainer‐trained program will help reduce too much individualization.
Prerequisites and Follow‐Up
It is important for a trainer to be very involved in communications before a class and to follow‐up with their students. Some of those responsibilities were covered in Chapter 13. The administrator, however, has the important task of documenting those conversations.
Prerequisites
The process of learning about your products is not started and completed in one learning transaction. That does not minimize the importance of the training event. It is important to get as much out of the education process as possible. The more prepared students are before they come, the more they will learn from the class. The more distractions an administrator can help eliminate, the more focused the students will be in class.
Here are a few things to consider as part of the pre‐communications. These are in addition to the list in Chapter 13. Add your own items to this list as necessary.
- Consider creating a welcome guide. It can include things like…
- Directions to the training event
- Local hotels
- Local restaurants
- Local shopping: malls, pharmacies, and so on.
- Tourist sites
- Current weather information
- Public transportation options
- Send information about the instructor. This is often better done by a third party. “She is an expert in…” sounds so much better than “I am an expert in….”
- Send any pre‐reading material between 1 and 2 weeks ahead of the class. This should include the code of conduct, especially if it is a certification course.
Follow‐Up
Don’t stop the communication after the students leave. Always continue the conversation after the classroom event is over. Many administrators or instructors send follow‐up emails to their students for one of two good reasons.
Many instructors communicate with their students after a training session because they feel it is the polite thing to do. They want to show their interest in the students and make themselves available for questions. That is honorable and important. Others follow up students in order to get feedback. They may send a survey or further evaluation with the goal of improving the class in the future. That, also, is an honorable thing to do.
Those are both good and important things to do, but they are not the main reason why continuing the conversation with your students is important. Following up with students is not just a polite thing to do and it isn’t just about getting them to help us do better in the future. Follow‐up has an important role in the success of the training that was just delivered. We have all read discouraging statistics about how much people remember after a training event. Hands‐on learning will help to increase what people remember, but it isn’t a cure‐all. Reminding students about what they have learned and how they can apply their learning on the job will help to make the learning more successful. When the learning is successful, you will be successful.
Here are a few things to consider as a follow‐up after the class. These are in addition to the instructor list in Chapter 13. Add your own as necessary and appropriate.
- Invite students to any existing knowledge group where they can continue to share and learn.
- Remind students of their commitments and learning.
- Send a delayed survey for their feedback on the class after some time has gone by.
- Remind them of further learning opportunities.
- Ask for key successes and how they have applied the learning.
- Ask how you can better prompt them of their learning when they are on the job.
- Ask them to recommend the class to other students or their leaders.
Good follow‐up is the right thing to do for the student. If you can trigger their memories enough to apply what they learned in the class, you will be helping them. When you help them, you will be creating a better training program.
Traceable
The third administrative role of any training department is to ensure that you know who has taken what classes and who taught them. This is important for professional, legal, and practical reasons. Many companies are finding that much more training is being delivered than they are aware of. This can create problems when a customer claims to have gone through “training” from our company, but doesn’t show up on any records.
You Can’t Be Rewarded for Success You Can’t Prove
Success isn’t all about numbers. But successful training departments must know the numbers. You need to track people and programs as well as business results. The statement that you can’t be rewarded for success you can’t prove has a related, much more sinister, and dangerous alternative statement: you can be held liable for training you can’t prove.
Protect yourself and your company. Certificates with your company logo on them could be used as legal evidence of how or what a student was taught. Never allow employees to hand out certificates with the company logo on them unless that information is being tracked. If you have any questions about this, seek advice from your legal experts.
Tracking People and Programs
Most training departments will use an LMS to help them track their students. If you can use your corporate LMS, you may choose to do so. Many smaller technical training departments find that they cannot use it, either because it is accessible only to the Human Resources department or because it is behind the company firewall and they need access for both customers and employees.
This book will not go into the details of choosing a good LMS. There are many, many available. They range from open‐source structures to expensive enterprise systems that include proprietary content. They all have their specialties and some are better at certain things than others. If you are in the position of considering an LMS for your hands‐on product training, there are many things to consider. Create a spreadsheet and compare each LMS based on these and any additional criteria you have. For ideas, download the comparison sheets from LMS websites. Use multiple ones, since a provider will not ask you to compare something they are not good at!
Always get a demo before you purchase. Most providers will allow you a free trial period and I suggest you take advantage of the offer. You can learn a lot when you try to apply it in your own setting and under your circumstances.
There are a couple of key things that product trainers need to consider that are not available in all LMS programs. They may or may not apply to your training.
- Does it manage individuals only, or can it manage companies?
All good LMS help track an individual from point A (no training) to point B (fully trained). Fewer LMS are capable of tracking an entire organization’s progress.
Suppose you are running a program that requires a company to have five trained (or certified) employees on your product in order to maintain their authorization to sell or install your product. Can the LMS manage that?
- How does the LMS handle classroom training?
Almost all LMS will say they can handle classroom training. Most are built first for eLearning. That’s easy, since it is an electronic management system managing electronic learning. It is harder to create a good LMS that handles classroom learning in a way that doesn’t complicate life for the instructor. Know what you are getting into before you buy.
- How do students register?
- Is the LMS able to handle external registrations? Does it have an external marketing/registration page?
- Can one person register several people from their company?
- How does the system handle no‐shows and cancelations?
- How do you use it to track prerequisites and follow‐up work?
- How does it handle private classes?
- How flexible is the database? Can the data be exported to other programs? Caution: Do not use an LMS that does not give you complete ownership of your database.
- How does it handle payment for classes?
This is important if you are charging customers for your product training. If you have a tiered go‐to‐market system, this may create further questions.
- If it requires my corporate merchant account (unless you own your company, you may have to jump through many hoops to get this), will they help with that process?
- Does it allow for multiple payment methods?
- Does it have a discount method (vouchers, discount codes, or other means)?
- How do evaluations and assessments work on the LMS?
Too many instructors are forced to bypass the LMS because it isn’t practical as an exam delivery tool. You should at least know what you are getting.
- What types of questions can it handle?
- Does it allow for question pooling by topic or objective?
- How is the exam administered (online, on paper, etc.)?
- Does it print or email (or both) the certificate?
- What does it look like to the end user?.
If you are using this for customer‐facing training, the aesthetics of the LMS are important. It represents your company and the quality of your training program.
- How many clicks does it take the customer to register for training?
- Does the look and feel represent the message we want to deliver?
- Does it share the information I want and only the information I want to the customers I want to share it to?
Of course, there are many other considerations that are not unique to classroom or customer training. They are important to consider as well.
- Is it cloud‐based or managed internally?
- How easy is it to learn and use for the administrator?
- What other types of delivery platforms can it handle (i.e., mobile)?
- What types of reporting can it handle? How about customizing reports?
- Finally, how much does it cost?
- Almost all systems require a start‐up cost. Find out what is included in those costs in detail.
- Do they charge by student, by course, by flat fee, or others? There are many different ways to charge for an LMS. Most providers will offer more than one way to pay, since every company and every need is different.
Tracking Business Results
Tracking business results is a much more difficult task than merely keeping track of who has taken a course. The responsibility of tracking business results often falls on a training manager, but it is impossible to track without the help of instructors, coordinators, and (almost always) a number of people outside of the training department.
Business results are most often tested as a return on investment. Simply speaking, corporate leaders want to know if the money they are allocating to training is a cost or an investment. More importantly, they want to know that the training is helping the organization meet a greater strategy. The only way to know that is to track what is important to the company. In their book What Makes a Great Training Organization?, Harward and Taylor state that being aligned strategically “is the single most important factor that impacts whether a training organization is viewed as… being great.”1 The challenge is that your product training likely falls into one of four business reasons. To complicate it further, if you teach more than one product training class, you probably have some classes in each category. Each needs to be tracked for its own reasons.
Tracking Compliance
Depending on your industry, there are multiple types of compliance training. I’m including here any training that is required, either by law or by the general practice of your industry. Tracking compliance training seems obvious. Most agencies won’t just take you at your word that John Doe took the training. Most have defined items to track and I will not attempt to even begin listing them. If you lead, teach, or administrate compliance training, you are much more aware of your industry requirements than I am.
Tracking Revenue Generation
This book is not about how to run training as a business. David Vance and others have written large volumes on this topic.2 In Chapter 5 I make a case that there is a difference between running training as a profit center and generating true revenue.
The best way to track revenue is to track the sales of individuals or companies that have gone through training and compare it with those who have not. You will almost always need a control group—a couple of companies who have not had the training. They may or may not know that they are the control group – that depends on your circumstances. The challenge will always be to eliminate other factors that could alter the results, either positively or negatively. I suggest running a 6‐month control group every five years or whenever you create a new, revenue‐generating class.
Tracking Cost Savings
Training that saves costs is slightly easier to calculate, but equally important. Here also, it will depend on the type of training. You may be able to calculate reduced technical support calls, installation time, up (or down) time, and so on. Run these analyses as a study; don’t try to run them constantly. There are always factors that influence the data that are beyond your control. If you run it for a shorter period of time, you will more likely be able to manually take out those factors. If you run them for long periods of time, your data may be discredited by one or two events beyond your control.
With both revenue‐generating training and cost‐saving training, you should be looking for opportunities to make these assessments at any time. Solicit the help of technical support leaders, sales leaders, and others. I once had a technical support manager approach me with an opportunity to compare two companies who were embarking on a very similar project. One had invested heavily in training, and the other had not. We followed them through the 3‐month project and found that our return on investment was several hundred times better than what we had been advertising! Of course, not all results are that outstanding, but the ability to measure it and the partnership with other leaders created an opportunity we might otherwise have missed.
Improve Services
This training may be seen as goodwill training. It is the training your company provides just to save face or to make friends in the industry. This is the training that salespeople ask for with a statement like “We need to give them this training because they are the leader in the industry,” or something similar. The truth is that most training that experts put into this category could actually fall into the revenue‐generating category if anyone knew how or took the time to measure it. If possible take that time and find that way. This type of training is fun to do, but hangs by a tenuous thread. When times get tough, goodwill tends to disappear!
Conclusion
Effective product training must be effectively administrated. Many years ago, I worked for a CEO who stated that the receptionist should be the highest paid person in the company. I don’t know if he actually did that (I never asked her!), but his point has always stayed with me. No matter how good your product is, if your customers get a bad first impression, they will be hard to win back.
The same is true with training. Great training can be ruined by bad administration. Good administration can help to cover a multitude of faults. It is important, not just because it makes training look better. It actually makes training better. Hands‐on learning works because it builds on a student’s own experiences. Good administration works when it helps the whole department build on its own collective experiences.
Never underestimate the power of good training administration. You must measure your success in order to be rewarded for them with an even greater training program.
Making It Practical
The administration of a technical training program may seem like a simple or unimportant task. The details of training have implications beyond organization and functionality. Effective administration actually improves the learning possibilities.
- In your own words, how does the administration of training affect the learning outcomes?
- What are the three things that every learning department must administrate effectively?
- What are the three things that must, at minimum, be recorded in any tracking system?
Before you read Chapter 20, “Developing New Product Talent: Effective Mentoring of New and Junior Employees,” answer these two questions.
- What have you learned from observing other professionals?
- In your own words, why do you think mentoring matters to companies?