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The Technical Training Enigma
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What's Inside This ChapterIn this chapter, you'll learn |
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How do you develop training for a specialized, complex subject that you don’t fully understand? This feat is accomplished daily by technical training developers all over the world. Technical training can be a mystery. An early experience opened my eyes to this:
I stare at the scribbled notes in front of me. My engineer co-worker has just given them to me so I can incorporate them into a training manual I am developing.
Make up your bottom hole assembly on the rig floor and trip in the hole. Apply weight until the pin shears and the whipstock anchor sets. Mill your window and watch your flow rate. Drill the rathole. POOH. Write up Post Job Report.
Wait, POOH? You can't be serious, I say to myself. What does that even mean? I reread the paragraph. This is one of my first big assignments as a curriculum developer for an oil field service company. I know I need to figure this out somehow. I read the paragraph again.
“You look confused.”
I look up and see my engineer co-worker standing in my doorway. “Do you have a question?” he asks.
I hesitate and then blurt awkwardly, “What is POOH?” He looks confused, and I quickly add, “What does the acronym P-O-O-H stand for?”
Laughter. “It stands for Pull Out of Hole, as in when you are taking equipment out of the ground,” he says, a smile on his face.
“Oh,” I say. “Of course it does.”
Nowadays the “POOH” warning is one of the first things I bring up to my new technical writers. I don’t mention it to show my lack of technical knowledge, and I don’t mention it because saying “POOH” in front of a group of people is a great icebreaker. The story highlights the fundamental challenge of technical training: the Technical Training Enigma.
The Technical Training Enigma gets at the essence of what is difficult about technical training development. As a nontechnical course developer, you are doubly challenged: You must complete all the regular challenges of writing and putting together courseware, but you must do it by using words and concepts you don’t fully understand.
It is a process that can be astonishingly frustrating. If you are unable to crack this enigma, you lower your chances for success, and a poor work product can result.
There do exist strategies, tips, and tricks that can be used effectively to develop technical training, but before we delve into cracking this enigma, we must first address the basics: definitions and descriptions of terms that will be used throughout this book. We’ll start with the most basic question of all.
What Is Technical Training?
Technical training is instruction based on a technical product or a technical task. A technical product is something marketed or sold whose worth is determined by scientific, engineering, mathematical, or design principles. In other words, a technical product is a commodity that will assist in carrying out mechanical, production-related, scientific, or engineering tasks. Technical products include everything from tools, equipment, electronics, computer programs, devices, and instruments to gizmos, thingamajigs, widgets, and doodads.
Technical tasks include services, procedures, or jobs performed using a technical product. Technical tasks can be anything from repairing an HVAC system to running a lab spectrometer to designing an oil field drill bit to performing routine maintenance on a military tank engine.
So, for example, a centrifuge machine is considered a technical product. Related technical tasks might include the ways to assemble, disassemble, load, test, unload, maintain, operate, or troubleshoot the centrifuge machine.
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Basic RuleTechnical training is training based on a technical product or task. |
Technical training can proceed along one of three avenues, depending on whether its focus is on technical products, technical tasks, or a combination of both. So, for example, your training class could cover just the internal components and functioning of a machine (a technical products course), it could cover only how to operate that machine (a technical tasks course), or it could cover both (a combination technical products and tasks course). It is important that you identify which of these areas your technical topic encompasses, as this will affect future decisions you make about the course.
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Technical courses tend to have a primary target audience of individuals who will actually be working with or operating the products or equipment. This does not mean that these people already have operational experience. But, as part of their job description, they deal (or someday will be expected to deal) with highly specialized and complicated technical products or tasks. Examples of common target audiences for technical training courses include engineers, technicians, operators, programmers, doctors, researchers, mechanics, and inspectors.
Differences Between Technical and Nontechnical Training
While they do share some similarities, technical training and nontechnical training are quite different. Nontechnical training deals with soft skills such as leadership, management, conflict, public speaking, time management, project management, and so on.
Technical training is not as easily classified. For example, the content you would gather if you were developing an interpersonal communication skills course would be more or less the same whether you were teaching in a biomedical research lab or a big manufacturing center. However, the technical training content you would gather if you were designing technical courses for one of those places would be unique. In many instances, the course you develop will be the first of its kind. Whereas nontechnical content is more likely to apply across the board, technical content is specialized and specific to each topic.
Technical training topics usually have at least one of the following characteristics:
- A distinct vocabulary is used.
- Existing information and resources are scarce or solely experience based.
- It takes years to learn the intricacies of the topic.
- Available information is often proprietary.
- The product in question is in a state of development.
- Because it deals with complex and complicated topics, the technical training takes longer to develop.
Another significant—if not the most significant—difference between nontechnical and technical training is that technical training development is extremely dependent on subject matter experts. Because technical courses are designed based on the information given by a subject matter expert (SME), we are inherently dependent on the SME when designing a course. In fact, as the topics get more complicated, the instructional design “secret” becomes more about productive communication with your SME. Being able to draw information from an SME becomes a critical skill for a nontechnical designer developing a highly technical training course.
As you proceed through this book, you will find that developing your relationship with the SME and your ability to understand and comprehend information the SME gives you are among the most important skills you can have. Reliance on the SME marks one of the most fundamental differences between nontechnical training and technical training. The SME is the foundation for deciphering the Technical Training Enigma; cracking the enigma begins and ends with the SME.
What Is a Technical Organization?
In this age of multinational, multi-industrial, global omni-companies, it can be difficult to come up with one single definition of a technical organization. One way to define it is to look at whom the organization employs. Are the majority of its employees technicians, scientists, or engineers? If so, there is a good chance that the organization is technically based. There is also the obvious description of a technical organization as “an organization that deals with technology;” however, such a broad definition certainly does not describe the kind of work the organization does. Instead, consider this definition submitted by a professional who works with and for technical organizations:
A technical organization is any organization that creates or distributes technology to the consumer. This includes engineering and design organizations, including Research and Development (R&D) departments of large businesses, as well as the organizations that apply technology through the manufacture and implementation of tools, techniques, and systems.
So, a technical organization is any group that designs, makes, or sells anything complex.
—Stefanie Matta, Contract Technical Writer, Houston, Texas
This description provides a broad, but accurate, picture of what a technical organization is.
The Role of Technical Training Within the Technical Organization
Effective technical training is essential to the technical organization. Consider the following quotes:
In an age when Quality, Health, Safety, and Environmental Impact have become a focus at all levels, we cannot afford to ignore technical training, which is essential to safe and efficient operations.
—Bob Taylor, Founder, Taylormade Training Consultants, Perth, Australia
Effective, cost-controlled training is an absolute. Inefficiencies are not allowed. Time in class must produce learning or it and your coursework will eventually be eliminated. In short, bad training that produces little or no results will not endure today’s business environment.
—Kenny Amend, Hub Manager, Weatherford International, Houston, Texas
In the cutthroat world of today’s marketplace, there is no room for accidents, there is no room for quality control failures, and there is no room for inefficiency. Every technical product and technical service is produced and distributed under a microscope. Just by watching the news, you can see the catastrophic consequences that result if personnel dealing with technology are not adequately prepared. Following are some of the outputs of quality technical training.
Accident Prevention
One constant is that technical organizations face more risk of catastrophic accidents than do nontechnical organizations. For example, imagine a lawyer who mistypes a word versus an air-traffic controller software engineer who mistypes a word. What if a salesman skips a few steps in his sales call? How about a nuclear plant operator who skips a few steps in his processes?
For technical companies that deal with potentially dangerous equipment or services, effective training is absolutely essential. Nothing will torpedo a company faster than a disaster that could have been avoided by better training. Industrial companies lose people to accidents every year; it is inconceivable that such companies would settle for anything less than the best training available.
Cost Savings
How many man-hours could be saved if classroom training was as efficient as it could be? How often are participants allowed to mentally check out of training classes because of poor instructional structure? How many mistakes are made, or how many hours of productivity are lost, when someone must relearn on the job what he or she should have learned in class?
A lean, efficient company simply cannot afford to use old methods of training.
Quality of Product
When an organization’s employees are highly trained, the entire corporation benefits. Employees are then equipped with the knowledge and information to make informed choices on the job. The reliability of the product or service becomes established. The efficiency of the company pleases stockholders and investors. The company stays out of the newspaper disaster headlines.
A company can be truly enhanced and supported by its training department. For these reasons, good technical training is absolutely essential.
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In some technical organizations, you may find that several people within the technical training departments have little formal experience with educational research and training design. These training departments will be staffed with experienced technicians or engineers who have proven expertise in the field, but not necessarily in the classroom. In these training departments, the lack of effective instructional or curriculum design has one telltale sign: the 100 percent lecture class. Every class you see will consist solely of a lecture, typically with some derivative of a PowerPoint presentation.
The 100 percent lecture-based training is not a sign of laziness or lack of imagination. A lot of engineering and “hard sciences” programs in American universities are still primarily lecture based. Technical people who attended these schools and graduated with these majors will often default to reproduce the education they experienced, often unaware that new advances in educational technology have occurred. (Chapter 7, “Designing Classroom Exercises for Highly Technical Content,” will touch more on the research that backs up modern training and an active classroom.)
Your job will be to bring your technical organization’s training out of the nineteenth-century lecture and into the twenty-first-century interactive classroom.
What We’ve Learned
The Technical Training Enigma gets at the essence of what is difficult about technical training development. As a nontechnical course developer, your job is especially challenging: You must develop courseware using words and concepts you don’t fully understand.
It is certainly demanding, but the first step of solving the Technical Training Enigma is to gain an understanding of the basics of technical training. In this chapter, we saw that technical training deals with a technical product or task, and that the differences between nontechnical and technical training are distinct. (Technical training has its own set of challenges!) A technical organization is any group that designs, makes, or sells anything complex. In a world where quality, health, safety, and the environment are integral to business, effective training is a must.
The Technical Training Enigma will always exist, but there are specific tips, tricks, and tactics that can help ease you along the way. With preparation and a mastery of the processes and strategies contained in this book, you can meet your own technical training challenge with effectiveness.
Getting It Done
Understanding the technical organization within which you are working will help you to be more efficient in finishing your training development project.
| Worksheet 1–1. My Technical Training Project |
Answer the following questions to help you analyze your own technical training project.
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