By Linda Bush, Ph.D.

I have a story.

A trainer was walking along the beach and found a box. He looked around and didn't see anyone so he opened it. A genie appeared and thanked the man for letting him out. The genie said, "For your kindness I will grant you one wish, but only one."

The trainer thought for a minute and said, "I have always wanted to go to Hawaii but have never been able to because I'm afraid of flying, and ships make me claustrophobic and ill. So I wish for a road to be built from here to Hawaii."

The genie thought for a few minutes and said, "No, I don't think I can do that. Just think of all the work involved with the pilings needed to hold up the highway and how deep they would have to be to reach the bottom of the ocean. Think of all the concrete that would be needed. No, that is just too much to ask."

The trainer thought for a minute and then told the genie, "There is one other thing I have always wanted. I would like to see training have a measurable impact on human performance. I want to see that my learning strategies have changed behavior."

The genie's brow furrowed as he considered the man's second wish.

Then he said, "So, do you want two lanes or four?"
__________

As a professional, are you more like the trainer who only wishes for results; the genie who considers performance results impossible; or do you believe that training can produce results?

The word for May is RESULTS. Strengthen your belief that good training gets results by attending CIASTD programs.

• May 20– Saying Yes to the Future: Creative Problems-Solving
• June 25 – Workforce Development
• July 23 – Experiential Learning
• August 27 – Stories that Trainers Tell
• September 24 – Manufacturing Concept Learning Lab
• October 22 – Employee Loyalty and Engagement
• November 11 – Fall Education Conference (a plethora of results-oriented stuff)

A final thought:

The cause is hidden, but the result is well known.

Linda is president if CIASTD and is Director of Staff Development at ITT Educational Services, Inc.

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Patrice Waidner, Career Coach
By Fred Oaks, Facilitator Staff Member
[A regular feature of The Facilitator, Member Spotlight profiles a member of CIASTD randomly selected at a sponsored event. The idea is to help everyone get to know each other better.]

Patrice Waidner (pronounced WADE-ner) helps people find new and better jobs. She also assists employers searching for talented workers. To do these things well, she uses skills in training and development and cultivates her capacity to care.
Patrice has been an independent career coach since 2002. She leads workshops on networking, informational interviewing, and skill and career assessment. She provides these and other services to un- and underemployed people at WorkOne Express in Fishers. A day’s work may find her helping a downsized middle-aged professional write a resume, leading a Job Club group, or helping a job seeker discover latent potential. “I tell people, ‘You are more than your job title!’” Patrice declares. 80% of her clients are in middle age. Patrice helps them see options and think creatively about employment possibilities.

Patrice has discovered for herself the joys and challenges of midlife career change. After earning an MBA from Long Beach State University, Patrice had a 20-year career in information technology with EDS. Delphi downsized the Santa Barbara facility in 1992, prompting her to move to Indiana with EDS, for whom she continued to work within management. Her client was Delphi, a company that also employed her husband. The company had no local HR department. Instead, it provided training on a national level to people like Patrice, who in turn presented the training locally. She volunteered repeatedly for this training because she found it stimulating and rewarding. Unfortunately, she was downsized out of the company in 2000.

Training skills are now useful to Patrice as a career coach. The training she provides emphasizes the two keys to a successful job search: people and information. She provides 3- and 1-day seminars and two-hour workshops on a variety of topics, and is a certified JIST Trainer. Www.jist.com is one of Patrice’s favorite websites for career professionals. Indianapolis-based JIST Publishing, Inc. “offers a good selection of materials on all essential self-directed job search topics, career and job retention, and life skills.” Patrice also belongs to the Association of Career Professionals. Persons interested in Patrice’s career coaching services may contact her at 317 843-2364.

Patrice’s service to clients is built upon authentic caring. “People know that I care about them,” she says. “I do not just give them information and show them the door.” Asked to offer advice to new professionals, Patrice responded, “Care more about the individuals you work with than what you provide.” This caring is reflected in Patrice’s professionalism and in her volunteer work as well. She is a Big Sister and the membership director of The Business and Professional Exchange, a support group that attracts 70 people to its Monday meetings at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church.

Patrice recommends www.jobhuntersbible.com, a site designed as a supplement to Richard Bolles’s book, The 2004 edition of What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers. She enjoys gardening, National Public Radio, and time with her family: a husband and one son, age 18.

An avid reader, Patrice is especially fond of biographies and autobiographies. She recommends Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest by Sandra Day O’Connor and her brother H. Alan Day. To people who would like to think about their own life/work history, she suggests The Meaning of Life by Bradley Trebor Greive. Patrice’s love of biography makes perfect sense; her business is people.

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The Technology Based Training (TBT) Special Interest Group met again on March 30, 2004, at Made2Manage. The topic was “Rapid eLearning – What can you develop in 3-5 days?” Several new faces were in attendance. A special thanks to Made2Manage for hosting this event.

The process of Rapid eLearning comes from the ability to develop and deploy eLearning initiatives using standardized software tools (e.g. PowerPoint, Flash, Word, HTML, etc.) in a relatively short amount of time. The benefit that Rapid eLearning lies in the capitalization of this technology as it shortens your development timeframe. By eliminating some of the traditional development steps, and focusing on the core “tasks” you can bring life to an eLearning project in a relatively short amount of time. The reduction in redundant processes poses significant gains in customer and company satisfaction by having a deliverable training project on time and on budget.

Made2Manage started using a similar development style to accommodate the steady increase in demand for virtual training (11,000+ attendees in 2003). Two case studies from M2M were presented that support the adoption of this development style. First, Made2Manage developed recorded classes from their popular synchronous virtual classes to alleviate a large waitlist of virtual class students. The total time to develop a recorded class was approximately seven days, and the acceptance from customers was overwhelming in the first year because their demands were met. Future recordings lead to a technology change from downloading files to a streaming solution that uses a media server. The second case study involved an increase in the demand for more advanced topics. With use of standard development tools and the synchronous virtual classrooms (ILINC), M2M developed new advanced classes in 3-5 days from the customer initial request.

The development method, as best explained, uses a modified ADDIE and Thiagi RID approach where core components and technology are broken down into tasks and low cost technology alternatives, and then prioritized for development efficiency. From there, PowerPoints are developed with standard templates along with accompanying materials and job aids to download and deliver via the synchronous virtual classroom. The total time to develop, test, and deploy a new virtual class at M2M can take as little as three days with the Rapid eLearning process. One major component of M2M’s Rapid eLearning development process involves qualified SMEs that have been cross-trained with instructional design knowledge. This helped the overall development process, because the SMEs began to think in terms of “learning objectives” when designing the new classes.

The meeting concluded with a brief discussion about the legitimacy of this design process. Some great questions were addressed and stories were shared about past projects and low cost development tools. The entire presentation can be downloaded from the CIASTD website. If you have question about the meeting or about the Technology-based Training SIG, you can contact Jason Strasser, Instructional Technologist at jstrasser@made2manage.com.

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Help! We recently lost two staff members of the Facilitator. Do you enjoy writing? Would you like to contribute to CIASTD and get involved, but have limited amount of time? Writing for the Facilitator may be the perfect way for you to get involved! We have immediate need for someone to begin writing a monthly preview article of the upcoming meeting. This assignment requires fairly little time to write and is easy to research. If this sounds like something you would be interested in, email Jay McNaught at JMcNaught@cinergy.com. The pay is not great (you get paid in CIASTD bonus bucks!) but your help would be greatly appreciated!