Joe's Blog

If you are in charge of yours or an enterprise’s software development training approach and have invested in online and printed courseware, you are most likely wondering why your investment in these type of courseware materials materials are not showing any return.  From my experience, 95% of investments in online and printed materials are simply wasted resources.  You should be looking to instructor led training to get that critical first step in the learning process, that can then turn your online and printed courseware investment into a useful tool. 

 

Competent instructor led training is by far the most cost efficient method to acquiring skills in highly technical subjects such as software development.  The biggest hurdle to learning new software development techniques is the all important first step in understanding the high level capabilities of the specific skill set.  So many times in our classes during the introductions we hear that “there is a plethora of training materials available online and in print, however, I simply don’t know where to start”.  A good instructor can take complex patterns and give a high level understanding of the goals of a specific technique and thereby give the student a “boot” in the right direction.  Once given a high level understanding of the complex technique, it is amazing how quickly software developers can drill into intricate scenario’s regarding the complex system.  All of a sudden that mass of online and printed content now becomes useful. 

To achieve this crucial first step in knowledge transfer it takes a skilled instructor interacting directly with a student that has the prerequisite skill set to understand the complex pattern.  This can be done remotely; however, face to face is the preferred method, so that students can more easily ask questions as they arise. 

 

Beyond the critical first step there are a couple of other benefits to instructor-led training.  The first relates to simply setting the time aside to commit to learning.  This is another crucial piece of what is missing in online/printed types of courseware, the scheduled time to focus specifically on the subject at hand.  We actually prefer to hold the classes at our site since this even isolates the commitment to learning even more; however, onsite training is certainly highly successful in the knowledge transfer process.  Another benefit is a comprehensive approach to the subject matter.  A constant realization that we hear during our classes is that “wow, I’ve been doing this operation in a certain way, however, there is a feature available that makes it much easier that I didn’t know about!”  When software developers are self taught, they will usually find a single approach to get their application development effort going.  They then branch off all future efforts off of that single type of approach until exposed to a better method.  Instructor led training gives this comprehensive approach.

 

If you really want to make your investments in online and printed educational materials pay off, start the training process with competent instructor led training.