Overcoming the 7 Deadly Sins of Corporate Training Programs

JASON KUNKEL: Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. I don't know if it's a sunny afternoon out there or not. I've been in this building with you all since about 7:00 a.m. as well. But thanks for sticking around and joining us for Overcoming 7 Deadly Sins of Corporate Training Programs. So with that--

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Excellent. Well, thank you, Jason. My name is Donnie Gladfelter. I am the technical product and online manager at CADD Microsystems. We're an Autodesk Platinum Partner headquartered just outside of our nation's capital in Alexandria, Virginia. And as Jason will share here in a moment, he and I are both-- we both come from a background of trainers.

In fact, I've been a trainer now for more than a decade. I came before to CADD Microsystems from an organization where I was responsible for about 200, 250 CAD users and establishing the training program around that. So this has been a longstanding passion of mine, and it's something I'm incredibly excited to share with each of you here in the room and also each of you joining us online.

JASON KUNKEL: Thanks, and like Donnie said, our backgrounds are very, very similar. Donnie is kind of from the civil end. I'm from more of the architectural end. My name is Jason Kunkel. I am the AEC Manager over CADD Microsystems. We've got a team of consultants, and more specifically for this class, a team of trainers.

In my former life, I was the IT Director for a pretty major midatlantic firm over on the east coast there. And one of the things I ended up doing at that firm was helping to establish and set up the training program internally. We had a pretty big major training push. But beyond that, much like Donnie, I have a passion for education. I come from a family of educators. My mom, my sister-in-law, my grandmother, a bunch of dear friends-- they're all teachers, so it's kind of born into my DNA.

One quick note. Donnie mentioned we are broadcasting online. This presentation we're aiming for about 40, 45 minutes. So we definitely want some conversation, but we want to hold off the questions until the end. We've got some microphones set up so everybody's going be able to hear them. So once we get to the Q&A portion feel free to line up and ask questions that way.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: All right. So without any further ado, let's kind of jump in here. You signed up for this class, so you've probably seen these learning objectives. And today what we're going to do is study some of those key factors that in our experience, from both of our organizations, have sort of held us back.

These are areas that even we have failed at some point in our history as well, and our goal is to help you maybe not make some of the same mistakes that we did. And more importantly, how to overcome some of these key mistakes that we ourselves have made. And we've also seen many of the clients that we've worked with over the years make as well.

From there, we're going to focus a bit. You're going to hear us repeat several times the importance of establishing a mission statement with our training program. And that's going to be a big message of what we share here as we outline some of the key methodologies for establishing a successful training program.

And finally, we're going to put together a framework for you. I'm going to emphasize the term framework, not a step-by-step guide, because your firm is very different from the firm I came from and very different from the firms that Jason has worked with as well. And so we're going to outline with you, or for you, a framework that we find our successful clients have followed and also that we have implemented in the past as well.

JASON KUNKEL: All right, so we want to kick it off. This is not going to be the focus of our presentation-- the why. But we do want to spend a little bit of time talking about this. If you are here, if you're sitting in this class right now, if you're watching online, you probably understand the importance of having a structured and rigorous training program within your organization. Unfortunately, that's a difficult conversation sometimes to have.

So just a couple of key points we'd like to talk about. Employee retention. If you've got a good training program, employees like to stick around for that. They're educated, they're learned, they feel invested in the organization and in what they're doing.

Recruiting. With my past firm one of the big key recruiting indicators or items we used was our in-depth training program. People coming right out of school, people who have been in the industry for a long time-- they get excited about that. They think that's a great way for the company to invest back into the people.

Increasing efficiency. You learn more. You learn how to do better. You're going to do it a little bit faster. Unified work culture as well. So we're going to talk a little bit throughout the presentation about a culture of learning. So you've got this strategy-- you've got this baseline of the importance of education. And then everyone in the organization is going to understand why it's critical, why it's important to share information, why it's important to learn new things and to try things differently as well.

And this is a quote you've probably seen at one point, but this really sums it up for me. If you haven't seen it, it kind of hits home. It's about two managers and they're talking to each other. And the first one kind of asks, well, what happens if we spend all this time and we train all of our people and they leave? And then the counter-argument of course is, well, what if we don't train all our people and they stick around? So that kind of sums up the why portion for us there.

We want to roll right into our 7 Deadly Sins. We've got three sections to this presentation. The first one is just kind of laying down the sins. We're going to go through these pretty quickly. These are the seven major problems that we have seen, that we have done as well, when setting up our own programs in the past.

First one is something we like call Miracle in the Classroom. I'm going to send somebody to training. You need to learn Revit. You're going to go spend four days in a Revit class. Once you are done with those four days you are a Revit expert. You know everything about it.

You're a pro. Come on out. Teach--

DONNIE GLADFELTER: I'm not smart.

JASON KUNKEL: --everybody else. Yeah, everybody. It's not a problem. I mean, obviously with software and technology that we work with this is a problem. Some items, sure, you can learn in a day. You can learn it in half a day. But most of the things that we're talking about, most of the things that we work with in our industry takes much longer than a single sit down to kind of learn how to use it properly.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So number two is that the classroom is for training and the workplace is for working. We create this very hard line, this boundary, that learning is only something that should happen when I send you to training. But when you are at your desk working on projects, getting work done, getting projects out of the door, you best not be learning. You best be getting that deadline done.

JASON KUNKEL: All right, number three. You're going to teach everybody right now. I'm going to go back to that Revit training. That's kind of my bread and butter. That's what I cut my teeth on. We're going to spend a lot of money. We're going to get somebody in here to train you. We're going to spend a lot of money [INAUDIBLE] out of projects.

So let's get the entire firm trained at once. You might not actually touch the software for another eight months, but come on. Come on and learn now. You'll surely remember it after six months. It's going to be fine. It's not a problem at all.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So the first few here are probably pretty common central. But this one is maybe the touchy one that everyone is trainable. And this is sort of one of those painful things that we have to be honest with ourselves as we're putting together our training programs. That not everyone is trainable, and we have to be OK with that and we have to evaluate this in a pragmatic way.

JASON KUNKEL: So number five here. The only classroom people need is work. This is a misconception that we usually find from managers, from the older generations. They learned on the job. Everybody else can learn on the job as well.

Now, everybody probably can learn on the job. You can sit down, you can be given deadlines, you can be given the tools. You can probably learn what you need to learn, but it is not going to be nearly as efficient unless you have a structured training program as just to kind of throw something at you and expect you to learn it.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Next is this idea of the perfect class. If I could just get everything just right everything will be awesome. The other side to this too is-- you know what? I created the world's best Civil 3D class for Civil 3D 2010. Nothing's changed. It's the perfect class. Everything is good to go. That I've never updated it in the five, six, seven, however many years since then. And so the idea that the training that I put together is chiseled in stone, it will last in perpetuity, is a major sin that we've seen of many customers.

JASON KUNKEL: All right. So our lesson here is establishing a finish line with no milepost. And essentially this means I'm going to tell my employee, you need to be an expert at this. I'm not going to tell him how to get there. I'm not going to give them points along the way. I'm just going to tell them what the end goal is and expect them to find their way on their own.

All right. So those are seven sins. We want to talk a little bit about our sinners because you can't have sins without sinners. And really, what we're discussing here is not the people necessarily performing the sins. It's going to be the people who we need to teach, how we need to teach them and the facilities we're going to use to do that.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So first and foremost, as we are trying to get to know the people inside of our organizations, the truth of the matter is, we all learn a little bit different. And we've heard this time and time again. There's four primary ways that people learn, that all of us in this room learn, and those four ways are visual, auditory, read/write and kinesthetic.

And what we find so often is that training programs are going to focus on one of these areas. But truth be told, most of us require two or more of these methods to actually learn a piece of information. Some of us need the face-to-face, the sort of dynamicness of an environment like this. Whereas others of us, we just need the step-by-step guide and we can figure it out.

It's the sort of difference between going to YouTube or going to buy a book. Everyone learns differently, and unless your training program is aligning with each of these methods, then you might not really be delivering the training that you think you are.

And so as a second piece to this-- even if I apply all of these methods here, there is kind of a dirty little secret. And this is not something that's a very popular thing to think about. Imagine you send somebody to training, you spend thousands of dollars to get your staff trained, and by the time they get invoiced your team has only retained 10% of what your company is writing a check for.

And this is the sort of harsh reality that we're up against. That without reinforcing the learning that I invest in, after just an hour I'm going to forget up to 50% of what I learned. By the time you leave this class today half of it is going to be just sort of poof. And if you came here on Monday and you attended any of the summits-- that was just two days ago. There's a good chance you've already forgotten 80% of what you learned on Monday, and that's not even taking into account the open bar factor that we have here at AU.

JASON KUNKEL: So I would also recommend, if you're going to forget 50% of this class, forget Donnie's 50%. Hang on to mine. Anyway, so along with our sinners as well. It's not just the people. It's how we are sinning as well.

So we're going to talk about-- there's two primary methods of delivery in terms of training. You've got in-person classroom training and you've got online training, and neither one is perfect. There's pros and cons to each, and these should be pretty common sensical. Nothing up there should be shocking to anyone.

In terms of classroom in-person training-- so, sir, can I ask you to stand up? Thank you. You can sit back down. So that's the benefit of in-person training, right? You've got interaction right there. You can immediately see the person face to face. You can ask them questions. If the students have questions they can ask the questions immediately.

The issues, of course are it's very time consuming. This is a lot of people in a room. You've obviously committed to come to the conference. But we're all in this room, it's an hour of your time, and on top of that it's an issue logistically. If this is happening during work hours, this is a lot of money that we are not being productive with.

Back at my old firm, we made a commitment that we wanted to do as many classes in person as made sense to be in person. We had four locations, and we had a training room in the headquarters. So we decided it was critical to get everybody together, and it was a challenge to schedule everyone. Some people we had to get hotels for, some of them we had to get rental cars for, but it was important. But we got over that hurdle, and we were able to leverage the in-person training as much as possible.

Now for the online and on-demand training you just flip it on your head. You can take it at any time. The classes are short. It's usually relatively inexpensive compared to getting ready in a classroom. But there's no interaction, there's no questions that you could ask back and forth, and there's no way for the class to adapt to the audience.

So a properly trained instructor, and this can take some time, is going to be able to adjust their class based on the kind of questions they're getting and the feedback they're getting. Now, that's never going to happen online. And then the other issue with it being online is it's tricky to anticipate the needs. You kind of got to guess. Make an educated guess, but you got to make a guess at what kind of classes you're going to need and prepare them all ahead of time.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So we understand the basic dynamics of the people that we're trying to reach, the people that we're trying to share some form of knowledge with, but what are the virtues that allow me to be or to establish a successful training program? And the first of these is something we'd like to refer to as an education mission statement. I mentioned this at the very beginning during the objectives.

And a book that Jason and I have both read is Disney U. It's all about Walt Disney's internal training program. And one of the cornerstones, one of those foundational building blocks of what they do, is establish a education mission statement of what their training program is going to be. But I think just as importantly as what the training program is going to be is also defining what the training program isn't going to be. You have to kind of know what your north compass is and be able to follow that.

JASON KUNKEL: So the other virtue we like to talk about-- and you'll notice at the bottom, we've got our sins labeled there. There's one through seven. So this is not a one-to-one relationship of this is going to fix this sin. We found these seven virtues, these seven components to a successful program, and they kind of apply to different sins across the way. So we've tried to highlight which sins they are on there.

Learning paths. So while our mission statement is kind of our overall umbrella of what my company wants to do and why we want to do training, a learning path is going to be a very specific itemized training outline for my individual employees. So person A needs to take these classes by this date. Person B needs to take these classes by this date.

Now, this might sound like it's extremely time consuming. It's not. We have seen it rolled into-- and I've [INAUDIBLE] myself this way that we've rolled it into annual reviews. Takes about five extra minutes. You sit down with your team, you go over the course outlines order available, they have some ideas of what they want to take and you have ideas of what you expect them to take.

And on top of that, not only outlining what classes are available. This is an excellent time to get feedback about what classes they would like to see available too. So it's a good communication. It's a good way to start generating that culture of the importance of education all up and down the board there.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So continuing down this is also understanding my kingdom. Understanding the landscape that I'm working with. And the first of this is to understand what people need to know. Now, this might seem kind of simple going around and saying, how about you, sir? What would you like to learn?

But it's a bit deeper than that because training programs, at the end of the day, are as much about supporting the individual as they are the business. The skills that we're developing inside of organizations ultimately need to translate to some sort of business objective, something that's going to make my company profitable or fit into the overall mission statement of my company.

So first and foremost, we need to understand what people need to know, and also just as important as that is to understand who knows what. This is sort of surveying the landscape. There's obviously a lot of intellectual knowledge already inside of your organization, so where is that? Who are the champions? Who knows what?

And finally, what training is already happening? And I use the word training here in the most loose way possible. And what I mean by that is we could probably replace training here with just sort of learning. We're not just talking about stuff that happens in the classroom.

But what about when you and a colleague chatted about a problem you were having in AutoCAD or Revit or whatever the product that you happen to use might be? What about when you had the IT guy respond to a helpdesk ticket about a particular problem an end user was having and that kind of turned into over-the-shoulder training? Or what about when a vendor came in and provided a lunch and learn in that capacity?

These are all learning opportunities. All the sharing of knowledge within my company that's happening, and I need to understand what that is so I can get a proper assessment of that landscape.

JASON KUNKEL: So another virtue-- communication. I mean, this feels kind of redundant. Every time you go to some conversation like this communication is key, communication is key, communication is key. You've got a poster on the wall that probably says that back in your office as well, but it absolutely is essential.

And we talk about two levels of communication here. First one is communication with management. You want to be able to talk up. You want to be able to have those conversations with management about why you're doing this and why they want you to do this. You want to get buy in. It's essential you get buy in, and it is essential you have a conversation with them to understand what their long term goals might be so you can modify it in just the training program that way.

Now, the other tab we got here is for accessibility. This is more informal communication. You need to be able to be accessible to everyone as much as possible in the organization. It might be a water cooler conversation. You might just peek into their cube one day and see how things are going. But you've got to have that two-way communication, that accessibility, so everybody understands this is who I'm going to go to talk about training and training is important for us to talk about as well.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So continuing this theme of understanding the dynamics of my company and the dynamics, more importantly, of the individuals and tying into that sort of VARK method-- the visual, auditory, read/write and kinesthetic that we talked about just a little while ago-- is this sort of notion of having a blended curriculum. My training program ultimately shouldn't be exclusively classroom training, just as it probably shouldn't be exclusively quick little Camtasia snippet videos that I recorded and posted on the company intranet. This is where I'm trying to sort of blend not just classroom learning but understand the scale of whatever topic that I'm trying to share might be.

Some topics-- if I'm trying to teach somebody AutoCAD or Revit or Civil 3D or Inventor from the ground up, you're not going to get that done in an hour. You're not going to get that done in a day. You're going to need that three, four, or however many day class. On the other side, there are some topics that are perfectly scalable and perfectly aligned with a day long class. There's also things that are perfectly aligned with just addressing over the shoulder or with that quick Camtasia or Snagit video.

Or finally, there is a place for what I like to refer to as impact trading. The more common term used for this is lunch-and-learns. And I know I'm going to aggravate you by using that term, aren't I?

JASON KUNKEL: Yeah. I've got a little soapbox about lunch-and-learns, and I'm going to hop on my soapbox right now. So here's my soapbox. I'm going to hop on it. Here in The States, here with architects and engineers, most of the firms we go to they have lunch-and-learns. Once a month, every other week everybody is going to come during their lunch hour. They're going to come learn something new and something critical.

So I've got a couple issues around the implementation of lunch-and-learns. One, certainly here in the US, lunchtime is a little sacred. We're supposed to be 8 to 5 or 9 to 6, and you get that hour. And sometimes you got to run an errand during that hour. That is the employee's time to go take care of employee stuff. And on top of that, it's unscheduled and it's during their time.

So the firm is saying, come learn this. It's not that important though. In fact, we might buy you pizza. Your hour is worth a couple cents for a couple of slices of pie right now. If it's something critical, if it's something important, if everybody needs to know it, schedule real time for it. That, again, increases that importance in the culture of education for your entire organization. I pushed and I kicked and I screamed back at my old firm to do away with lunch-and-learns. Now, if a vendor comes in, they bring food, that's a totally different issue. I'm talking about internal training.

So we went from lunch-and-learns to Tuesday brunches with Revit. We didn't serve any food, but they were every other Tuesdays at 10:00. We'd schedule an hour for it. Everybody would come in, all the Revit users would come, and we would have a conversation. Didn't necessarily last an hour, but it was scheduled because it was important for these people to learn how to do this, and it was important to emit the need for the training and the importance of training as well. So I will get off my lunch-and-learn soapbox right now and we can keep rolling.

So another virtue we've got is the importance of measuring progress. As you establish the different ways you're going to teach, as you establish your mission statement, you've got to figure out what's important in terms of metrics and how am I going to know if my training program is successful. Now, you've got to get a little creative with this. There's going to be different ways and different methods to collect the data. It's kind of all centered around what data you want to collect.

An example first and foremost that's an easy one is going to be to send out surveys at the end of classes. They do surveys at the end of all these sessions. Any conference you've been to there's probably a survey when you're done asking people how it is. So for your internal training Survey Monkey is not that expensive. I'm not trying to throw an advertisement for Survey Monkey, but make a short five question questionnaire that everybody needs to fill out at that point.

Another metric you can go by-- if you get a lot of help desk questions on phasing in Revit and then you do a class on phasing in Revit, I would hope the number of help desk items is going to drop. If it doesn't there is something wrong that class. You need to go re-evaluate that class there.

So those are just two methods that we like to look into that you can use as concrete. Other ways to measure progress-- there's internal conversations about employees' satisfaction, and then, of course, if one of your goals is profitability start watching your profitability. If you go with your training program and you start losing more money, you might want to start reevaluating things at that point.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: All right. So continuing down this. And this is sort of an abstract one of policies and standards. So what I mean by this is I would imagine that many of you in this room, in addition to having training as a responsibility, you may very well also be the CAD or BIM or VDC or whatever new acronym we've got this month inside of your firm. You're responsible for saying, this is the layer that something goes on, or my text is going to be Arial or it's going to be a tenth of an inch tall or an eighth of an inch tall.

The trouble is, when we blend these two kind of worlds together, when we blend the learning world and the standard world together, they both have very different shelf lives. I would hope that if I come up with a standard that my text is going to be an eighth of an inch tall and it's going to use Arial font-- that's probably going to outlast whatever the tool is that I'm using right now. I might have established that standard back in the Land Desktop days, and I'm 10 years into Civil 3D at this point.

And so the idea being that instead of blending my CAD standards or BIM standards with the training and learning, they should be two separate documents. Now, it's not to say that your policies or your procedures shouldn't align with the standards. They should absolutely use the standards. But again, these should be two very different documents.

One is meant for establishing, dare I say, the law of the land. The second one is about teaching people how to use the law of the land. It's sort of the Driver's Ed manual. It's not the letter of the law if you go and look at the municipal code or the state code about driving. It's the how do you obey a stop sign kind of learning manual that your teenage driver gets to follow through.

JASON KUNKEL: Leave it to Donnie to bring up municipal codes during his AU session.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: I haven't said Jeffersonian grid yet.

JASON KUNKEL: No Jeffersonian grids yet. So our next section here is the 7 Steps to Training Righteousness. So this is our rough framework. We've talked about our sinner,s we've talked about the different ingredients that we see in successful programs, and then this is our framework or a rough guideline for how we recommend implementing a successful training program in your organization.

Now, as you look through these you may already be on step seven, or you might be on five and you skipped one through four. So you need to evaluate where you are. You need to align it with your own goals in your own organizational structure and the size. So as just a general guideline, this is what we like to recommend and this is what we go with as well when we're working with clients at this point.

First and foremost, find your evangelist. If you're in this room, whether or not you know it, there's a good chance you're the training evangelist. You've come here today. You're spending your valuable time. It's important to you. Own that. Take that in. You're not going to get probably a bonus for it, you're probably not going to get a new title, but it is critical. It is important. And you've got to be able to get up behind the podium there and you've got to be able to preach and you've got to be able convince other people how important it is and why it's important.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: So next is back to that notion of establishing the lay of the land. And this is one of those where, as I've worked with other clients-- and frankly, when I was building training my own training program at my former firm-- I, if I'm being honest with myself, skipped a couple of these steps as well. There's a reality that we have to admit to ourselves. That there are really two big audiences that I am communicating with or that I need to communicate with.

The first, and the one that we typically focus on of course, are the people I'm trying to train. My learners. But just as important is communicating to management. And if you've ever had this sort of communication dynamic-- if you're already a CAD or BIM manager you've probably lived this world for some time. The sort of dialogue that you have with an end user, or a learner in this capacity, should be a bit different than the dialogue that you have with a manager.

Again, they're on two different planes. It's not to say that one is more or less important than the other. It's about really knowing your audience. And so what we need to do, if I'm going to put together a strong, successful program, first and foremost, I need to discover. I need to perform that survey of understanding the training that's already happening inside of my organization, understand who knows what inside of the organization.

And the most important piece to this is, while I might already do that in an informal capacity or I may have been with my company for a decade already so I just already know all of that information-- we need to formalize this. We need to bring it together. We need to summarize it. It needs to be a document that I'm able to hand over to management.

Also, by establishing that discipline of myself to create that document to actually generate that summary, it also helps me identify precisely what it is that I'm asking for. It's not enough just to go to management and say, hey, I want a training program. I can't tell you the number of firms that Jason and I have both gone into and talked about training and training is referred to as the T-word.

Anyone in that company where training is the T-word? It's sort of this bad word because of the bad taste that the previous 12 training programs that have been attempted inside of the organization have left in management's mouth. So we have to understand precisely what I am asking of management, and I need to present that to management. And this is really establishing the runway into step number three.

JASON KUNKEL: So step number three. We mentioned it early on. It's a mission statement. Your mission statement is important. You know you are the evangelist. You have talked with management. You understand what their goals are. You need to align those goals with your goals. Sneak them in there a little bit. But you want to build up your mission statement. You want to decide, why are you doing training at your organization? What are you aiming for? Why are you trying to accomplish this?

So at my prior firm we had a very broad and very vague mission statement. It was simply to improve the lives of the employees. It wasn't about money. It wasn't about being faster. It was about making the employees better, and that dictated things down the line. We absolutely had classes on how to use x software and what policy y meant and what the new state code was. But it also informed the classes we got in there.

We had training on personal finance. We had training on organizational skills. We had a whole host of training that was work appropriate but not necessarily specifically task appropriate. And again, this is really critical. It doesn't be long. It doesn't have to be huge. It can be a sentence, it can be two sentences, but this is the measure that you align all of your training decisions up against. Does it fit within this mission statement?

And it's not necessarily locked down in stone. One of our steps later on is to kind of re-evaluate everything. Your mission statement can absolutely be re-evaluated down the line as well.

So next, after you get the mission statement you got to start getting your Lego blocks together and picking the parts that you know you can use to build your training. First one up there is select your deans. And we're in Vegas so we've got Dean Martin here, or, because I'm a giant nerd, we've got Dean Cain there. If you like your Dean last names we got James Dean, and then one of my favorite Deans is of course Jimmy Dean's pancakes and sausage on a stick.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: Yum.

JASON KUNKEL: We picked the word dean very specifically. Your Dean's may be, but they are not necessarily, your teachers. The Dean's job, if we're aligning this to a university or a college-- a Dean's job is to make sure the students stay happy. It's about student life and a component of that is education. But a component of that also is communication with those students to make sure they're learning and they're accomplishing what they feel they need to accomplish.

Now, it's easier to align these and break down your Deans if you have different kinds of divisions within your training program. It depends on your size, it depends on how many people you have, so the evangelist may be the Dean who may also be the instructor. Larger groups may have an evangelist, you may have several Deans, and you have multiple instructors beyond there.

Back at my old firm we broke things up into a technology school. We had a design school, we had a code school as well. So there were three things kind of broken up. w would meet periodically to make sure we were all in alignment, make sure we didn't have too much overlap and to make sure everything was happy along there.

So hand in hand with the Dean is selecting your teachers. This is also another tricky conversation. Kind of going back to one of our earlier sins about everybody being trainable. Not everybody is a teacher. You know your kingdom now. You've talked to everybody in the organization. You probably already know who is strong in what topic and who is weak in what topics.

Now Fred-- I apologize if there's any Fred's in the audience. Fred may be your best ace Revit user across the board. He knows everything. Fred is also kind of a jerk. Fred would not be a good teacher. Even though he knows everything, you need a certain level of empathy and understanding to be able to go and get in front and teach people these things. You have patience.

Now, you don't need the world's best teachers at all. Nobody in the organization is going to expect you to bring in these top notch, college educated professors to train your group and train your organization. But you do need people with a certain personality of understanding and patience, and certainly a level of knowledge of the topic as well. So again, that's a tricky conversation to have, but you want to be careful about who you pick to teach your classes.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: And continuing along this trend here of identifying the program elements, we've kind of mentioned this a little earlier. But one of the key things that I realized very early on as I was building a training program at my former firm was just what a treasure trove of information Helpdesk was. Helpdesk is a really good pulse on the health of learning inside of your organization.

Back to what Jason said earlier. If I teach a class on phasing I should hopefully see an appreciable decline in the number of helpdesk cases associated with phasing inside of Revit, or plotting or insert the name of the topic here. It doesn't really matter. And so, in addition to creating those KPIs, or key performance indicators if you're not familiar with that acronym, it's also important to look at helpdesk trends as a tool to identify the topics I should be training about.

So again, if I'm getting a lot of helpdesk tickets about plotting, well, maybe I need to create an AutoCAD plotting class or phasing or generating cut fill in civil 3D. Whatever the topic might be, I would be willing to wager, if you simply look at your helpdesk, you're going to pull out a lot of the key topics your organization is just dying for knowledge on.

And with this, by knowing my kingdom, by performing that survey, by identifying the ask, by getting in alignment with management, by doing all of this pre-work looking at my helpdesk-- this is at the point where I have a really good pulse on the organization. I understand what my users need. I understand what the business objectives of my organization happens to be.

This is where we get to the point of saying, you know what? We need to have a Revit level 1 class and it's going to be this direction. Or you know what? There is plotting inside of AutoCAD. That doesn't need to be a multi-day class. We can probably do that through IMPACT training. But we need to breakdown, understand the sort of economics, understand the scale of each of these topics and align them with specific classes that I'm going to be offering.

This is still me too. And so, this is the fun part. Now, if you're here this is the part that we kind of jumped straight to when we're talking about training. And I think the most important takeaway here-- this is step five. I know when I first had the task of creating a training program for my organization I went straight to this. I said, hey, this is the fun part. I want to start creating some Civil 3D training or Land Desktop training or whatever it might have been at the time.

But again, this is many steps along the road. The most important takeaway at this particular juncture is to understand all of the pre-work I've done. The planning. The identification. Make sure that I've established that mission statement. Make sure that I'm in lockstep with what management wants, and I'm also in lockstep with what my users want. And it's at this point, and I think this point only, am I ready to kind of take off and start building this training program.

JASON KUNKEL: So you've got to bill. You know who's going to be doing your teaching. You know who your Deans are. You know what management wants. You know what you want. You've got all your resources lined up. Step six is simply start it. Do it. You've put a lot of time. You invested a lot of resources in it. Kick it off.

Don't worry about getting it perfect. Step six is not perfect it then start it. It is start it. Your employees are going to be extremely forgiving on this. That is something we have seen time and time again. It's never perfect coming out of the gate. People are just excited to learn something new. They're simply excited to see that the organization is willing to put time and resources back into them. It gets them interested again. It gets them excited. Just begin. Kick it off. Step number six, which rolls in step number seven-- lather, rinse, repeat.

None of this stuff earlier is going to be set in stone. It's going to be carved in mud, and it should be carved in mud. It goes back to our perfect class. It goes back to our miracle in the classroom. You want to be able to re-evaluate what you've done. You may have a formalized process for this. You certainly want to look at your surveys. You certainly want to take into account all the conversations you have.

Maybe once a year the Deans sit down, you look over the entire class workbook and you decide, well, we don't need this class anymore. We want to get this class. Got to have that conversation then again with management. Bring them back into the fold. Make sure they understand the changes you're making, and make sure you understand the changes they want to make two or three years down the road with their long term business plan.

So don't forget to change things up down the road. Don't forget to admit you've made mistakes. Again, it's going to be fine. It doesn't have to be perfect, but you do want to make sure you take the opportunity to fix what you've messed up already.

DONNIE GLADFELTER: All right. So we've talked about the sins, we've talked about the dynamics of the individuals and the components of a good program and the framework. And again, these are sort of a step by step framework of what I need to do. I think the most important piece here is first and foremost, be honest. Those sins? Not all of them were easy. The idea that everyone is trainable is a very popular idea but not a very realistic one. So we have to be very pragmatic and objective and truthful to ourselves.

With that, we also have to understand the true dynamics of the people inside of my organization. Ultimately, that's who I'm reporting to. I'm ultimately trying to improve the people in my organization so that it hopefully aligns to some sort of business objective inside of my organization too. And from there, it's about finding the right team, finding the right leader. Just because Fred is the foremost expert at that municipal code doesn't mean he is the best trainer. I guess you and Fred have a thing. I don't know.