Thursday, February 12, 2009
I am not a corporate trainer
After a recent round of staff cutbacks, we've had to rethink the way in which we deal with putting massive quantities of content on our website in something that resembles a timely manner. I have created some processes for reporting and tracking requests, which have resulted in a decent amount of success, but the third leg of our three-legged stool is training existing staff to make basic content updates to their sections of the site themselves. (What is the first leg? Why, my incredibly dedicated but extremely overallocated staff.)
So, in order for this process to work, the staff has to be trained in working with our content management system. And, with no training money, it is up to me to step up and train said staff. So, over the past week, I've managed to conduct two webinar-based training sessions for remote staff and two in-person trainings for local staff (I did pawn off one of the training sessions on my associate because I had a conflicting work session).
Training sessions are a challenge. You're on stage for two hours, talking constantly, addressing questions on the fly, trying to keep people awake and amused, striking a balance between hands-on and demo opportunities, and all the while trying to impart useful information that people may possibly remember one-tenth of the following day. In general, I seem to do well on all of the above, but it is an exhausting process that causes virtual brain death for the remaining hours of the day. Today, I ran two training sessions, put together my FY10 budget numbers, and ran through our resolved tickets to determine which ones could be closed. So, why do I feel like I haven't accomplished anything today?
Going back to the original premise of the blog post, I have a series of webinar-based trainings on tap over the next couple of weeks, as well as a couple of make-up sessions for staff who couldn't make it to the recent trainings. But, frankly, I'm hoping that I'm nearing the end of my teaching days so I can go back to strategy and content and development.
So, in order for this process to work, the staff has to be trained in working with our content management system. And, with no training money, it is up to me to step up and train said staff. So, over the past week, I've managed to conduct two webinar-based training sessions for remote staff and two in-person trainings for local staff (I did pawn off one of the training sessions on my associate because I had a conflicting work session).
Training sessions are a challenge. You're on stage for two hours, talking constantly, addressing questions on the fly, trying to keep people awake and amused, striking a balance between hands-on and demo opportunities, and all the while trying to impart useful information that people may possibly remember one-tenth of the following day. In general, I seem to do well on all of the above, but it is an exhausting process that causes virtual brain death for the remaining hours of the day. Today, I ran two training sessions, put together my FY10 budget numbers, and ran through our resolved tickets to determine which ones could be closed. So, why do I feel like I haven't accomplished anything today?
Going back to the original premise of the blog post, I have a series of webinar-based trainings on tap over the next couple of weeks, as well as a couple of make-up sessions for staff who couldn't make it to the recent trainings. But, frankly, I'm hoping that I'm nearing the end of my teaching days so I can go back to strategy and content and development.
