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Part 1: What is Corporate Training?

For those of you new to my column, I welcome you. For those of you who read my “Training the Trainer” column last year, I hope you found the information helpful in preparing Instructor-Led Training (ILT). All of those columns focused on delivering effective classroom training. Yet I have found that many of you don’t deliver traditional classroom training, but instead non-traditional training within your own organizations. You are essentially corporate trainers. In this article, I will begin to address the issues specific to corporate training.

Who is a Corporate Trainer?
Upgrades and new releases of Autodesk products are always right around the corner. Getting the users in your company productive on these products and existing products is your responsibility. Where do you start? With increasing demand for immediate productivity, there is less time than ever for traditional classroom instruction. The most effective corporate trainers focus the instruction on the design process and not on the features and functions of the software.

As a corporate trainer, you have unique challenges and issues that are quite different from traditional classroom training. My goal over the next five or six months is to outline a strategic plan for you to follow in preparing and delivering successful corporate training. I will also cover the problems and pitfalls in a category that I call “Illusions.” These illusions can prevent a corporate trainer from meeting his or her goals and objectives. Watch out for these illusions.

Illusion #1: The goal of every corporate trainer is to make the users in the company productive. This is an illusion. As a corporate trainer your goal is NOT to make the users in the company more productive. Your goal is to keep management happy!

Keeping Management Happy
Management is concerned about one thing: the bottom line! They want to get the most out of their investment. I’m not just talking about the investment of the software and hardware, but of the people who use it. This is the challenge of the corporate trainer. Yet without a proper plan to maximize both, most upgrades and training do not meet the goals and the expectations of management. How do you succeed?

Illusion #2: Getting everyone trained on the newest release of the software will make people more productive. This is an illusion. Once the training is complete, everyone will slowly sink back into old methods and old techniques, essentially using the software the same way they always have.

Tired of Tradition First, let’s get out of the way the things that don’t work in today’s design industry.

1. Traditional classroom training doesn’t work because it’s not interactive, it’s not applicable, and it simply doesn’t address the issues and problems that designers face on a daily basis.
2. Update training doesn’t work either. It gives you snippets of many new features and new functions, but it lacks the understanding of how to apply it to the users’ daily design process.

Both traditional and update training don’t work for the same reason—no one has evaluated the current design process to determine what features and functions are important to the specific design problems facing the users. Training participants often feel frustrated because the training does not affect how they work on a daily basis. They can’t see how the training is going to help them. As a trainer, you must focus on the needs of the company and the skill sets of the people. I will address this in future articles.

Why are we upgrading?
Most people are content with their current software solution, yet most companies that use Autodesk software are on subscription. Subscription means that you get the upgrade of the latest release of the software whether you want it or not.

Here’s where the subscription model fails. The entire purpose of upgrading your software is to take advantage of the features included with the latest version of the software. So with the subscription model you get the new software and maybe install it. Merely installing the software in itself does not make you more productive. Even if you have people who are proactive to learning and get training, this training does not necessarily translate into productivity.

Training is definitely important and you should get it. But rushing to generic or “out-of-the-box” update training and then returning to work without a plan to use the new features means you and your team will surely slip back into old techniques, and your new training knowledge will soon be forgotten.

In fact, many users fail to become more productive after getting training because they didn’t develop a plan. A truly successful plan will include four key stages: a current process analysis, a training program based on the gaps in the current process, an implementation phase, and then finally a review and follow-up. When all four are included in a comprehensive plan, I call this a complete process-based training program. This is the responsibility of the corporate trainer.

First Stage
I wanted to make sure I set the stage first. Now that you understand the goal of the corporate trainer and why traditional classroom training fails, stay tuned for next month’s article, which addresses how to prepare a successful process analysis. This is the first of four and most important stage in successful process-based corporate training.

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Submitted by Matt Murphy, chair of the Autodesk Training Center Advisory Board (ATCAB). Matt is an Autodesk Certified Instructor (ACI) who teaches AutoCAD productivity seminars at ATCs, Autodesk University, AUGI CAD Camp, AUGI CAD Matinee, and private companies. He can be reached at matt.murphy@ACADventures.com