April 20, 2005
ISPI Vancouver
It was a bit of conference culture shock to go from AERA to ISPI on opposite sides of Canada within a couple of days but I managed to adjust.
AERA is much more academic and research-focused while ISPI is business and performance-focused. At ISPI, my presentation was an encore session of one I did last year with my colleague James Lane on partnering to improve sales training performance (very different from my session on learning object ISD!). It was the first time I had given this session without James, who has moved on to other things, and 90 minutes is a long time for one person to speak! But, I kept people engaged by having them do things rather than just sit and listen to me carry on the whole time. What ensued was some great discussion about issues related to working as a designer in large organizations. It appears that many people in the room have to support training organizations that are made up of non-training professionals (gasp!).
One question from the audience created a bit of discussion, "If you are mixing people who come from the ‘business side’ rather than a ‘training background’ in your training department, how do you get respect for the training people?" I hear this quite often and it is an important concern to consider. First, if you ask this question, you already have a problem! We (training people) tend to think that we are somehow different, or have a different set of special knowledge that sets us apart. In one sense, we have different approaches because of the language we speak and our background. However, any performance or learning professional in a business setting must realize that they are business people first, and learning professionals second.
This need to be a business person first does not mean abandoning good design principles in favor of flavor of the month business trends, in fact, good design (not just instructional but organizational too) predicates innovative, survival-oriented businesses. We must not, however, get so enamored with exotic designs of our learning or performance solutions that we lose site of the fact that we are in business. Most businesses are not in business to create and deliver training. They are in business to do some other function. The goal of training and performance support is to enable success in the core mission of the company.
This means that as learning professionals, we gain respect in by helping make the business more successful and we gain respect by making those around us more successful. We can only do this by recognizing the strengths that everyone on the team and making our "unique" knowledge accessible and understandable by others around the table.
Posted by Rovy at April 20, 2005 8:47 AM