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Do Managers Dream of Electric Sheep?
Mar. 18th, 2006 06:49 amI spent a good portion of last night dreaming about the professional development of my instructor team. Crazy.
PD is something that is neglected in probably a huge percentage of organizations. My company, despite being a technical and business skills training provider, is just as guilty. Instructors hardly ever get the opportunity to take a class, and most often have to spend their non-teaching time (and evenings and weekends, unfortunately) reading and teaching themselves topics so they can pass exams and teach new courses. See my previous rants on the subject.
Now we're doing something about it. We (the national operations management team, all four of us) have distributed forms to the different branches asking about their ongoing needs and where they feel they are missing instructor resources. We've also distributed similar forms to our Product Managers, the gang that stays up to date on everything going on with specific vendors, like IBM and Microsoft. Their forms ask about future needs (Windows Vista, SQL 2005, Notes 7.5, ...). That's how big we are: there's a person whose entire job is to know what's going on with Microsoft!
The third piece of the puzzle is the instructors. I want to know what they want to learn, not just what the company wants them to learn. That way I can help make it happen when possible. So I dreamed about that process all night.
And now I am SO tired.
PD is something that is neglected in probably a huge percentage of organizations. My company, despite being a technical and business skills training provider, is just as guilty. Instructors hardly ever get the opportunity to take a class, and most often have to spend their non-teaching time (and evenings and weekends, unfortunately) reading and teaching themselves topics so they can pass exams and teach new courses. See my previous rants on the subject.
Now we're doing something about it. We (the national operations management team, all four of us) have distributed forms to the different branches asking about their ongoing needs and where they feel they are missing instructor resources. We've also distributed similar forms to our Product Managers, the gang that stays up to date on everything going on with specific vendors, like IBM and Microsoft. Their forms ask about future needs (Windows Vista, SQL 2005, Notes 7.5, ...). That's how big we are: there's a person whose entire job is to know what's going on with Microsoft!
The third piece of the puzzle is the instructors. I want to know what they want to learn, not just what the company wants them to learn. That way I can help make it happen when possible. So I dreamed about that process all night.
And now I am SO tired.
