Edge Interactive

The Life and Times of Virtual Brenda

When you work in an industry long enough, you get the feeling you’ve gained great wisdom and have seen pretty much every situation there is to see. Well, as you might guess, I felt like I had reached that pinnacle. At least until I received a call from one of our customers who ask me if I could stop by and discuss a project they were evaluating.
 
When I arrived, we sat down in a conference room and began to review an e-learning curriculum that had been developed and expanded over the last several years. The training was well done and designed around a local talent who played the role of Brenda in the training courses. Brenda was the sage person of wisdom who put the training in context and provided a consistent presence across the fairly large curriculum. So, the training was very good, Brenda was professional and provided the insight and continuity that were critically needed, and it seemed all was well. I began to wonder why I was sitting there.

Some Inspiration After a Tough Year

When our sons were growing up, we would spend hours at swim meets. Of the many sports that our sons participated in, swimming was by a large margin the most difficult for us as parents. The day would start at about 6:00 in the morning on a perfectly good Saturday. It was a spring sport so the weather was always unpredictable. Often we would see steam wafting off the bodies of the young swimmers as they got out of the water to practice their racing dives from the blocks. You knew that it was cold. So there we would be, 6:00 on a perfectly good spring Saturday morning watching with only the heartache the parent can feel as he watches his child shivering uncontrollably in a cloud of steam that reminded me of the last picture I saw of polar bears looking for fish. But that was only the beginning.

What I learned from Don Kirkpatrick

I was the guest of one of my clients at their annual user’s conference. It was a big time conference with many luminaries on the agenda. CLOs of Major Corporations like Xerox and Mayo Clinic. One was Don Kirkpatrick, whom I had never met or heard speak prior to this conference. For those of you who are new to training or perhaps have just woken up from a long nap, Don is the Godfather of Learning Evaluation. No-one is quoted more or expanded on in greater frequency than Don.

As we all do, I begin to imagine what Don was like prior to seeing him do his presentation. I imagined a reserved academic who would be willing to discuss the 4 levels all day with egotistical fervor, ready to defend even the slightest academic criticism of his work. I thought he would be a well-groomed, bearded man in a tweed sport coat. Perhaps he smoked a pipe. He would definitely be a person who wielded a merciless intellectual hammer against those who dared step into the academic and ideological ring with him.

In other words, he was probably not a nice person.

 

So what happened to “Training”?

Over the past few years I have struggled with using the word “training”. In fact, I struggle now more than ever. So why is this you ask? It is because the term seems so dated and archaic. Training used to have status. It had no panache but it was a solid activity.

Now I feel unprofessional and “not with it” when I use the word training. So what happened? Well, it goes like this, Training begat learning, leaning begat performance, and performance begat workforce learning and performance. Training just isn’t hip and current anymore.