There Is No Best Way…

A lot of my focus over the past few years has been on “customized” training… taking a scripted training (for lack of a better term) and customizing it (often on the fly) for a learner or a group of learners. My success rate with that is quite unpredictable. I have some sessions that go better than I could have ever anticipated… and I have some sessions that I wonder how we got past the icebreaker!

Customization of training is very fickle. In the typical corporate environment, it’s not something that’s really considered in my experience. In the world of client-training, however, it seems to have significantly more promise. I know when I walk into any client site that I have objectives to achieve. My customization of the program comes by talking with the learner for a while before we flip the switch. This helps me to know exactly how to train the material and related it to the learner’s notions and expectations.

Some reading over the holiday break brought me to an impressive resource that covers some of these ideals, but covers them within an eLearning framework. Tony Karrar blogs on eLearning Technology about a ton of absolutely impressive stuff, and I picked up this nugget within his Tool Set 2009 posting.

“A caveat that I make in every presentation on this topic is that studies of personal information management repeatedly show that tool sets and methods for personal work and learning are personal. The same tool and method can be highly effective for one person and not effective for others. It depends heavily on the person, the job, the needs, etc. Thus, whenever I say you “should” be using this tool, I really mean you should try this tool out and consider adopting it.”

This comment speaks right to my process of interviewing the learner and tailoring to their needs. I mean, honestly… I don’t expect anybody to do things exactly like I do, anymore than I would expect to do things exactly like somebody else does. We’re living in a rapidly evolving world, us training geeks. The sheer volume of tools that are available to trainers and learners is mind-boggling. So the question becomes “Is my way the best way?”

I like to answer that question with a very simple statement… “There is no best way, there is only a way.”

THE BALD TRUTH:  My goal as a trainer when I’m on a client site is clear… communicate knowledge and help steer the learners to finding the best way to use the knowledge to improve themselves. That should be the goal of any trainer, shouldn’t it?

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