Nathan Carpenter
ABSTRACT
Is your training program in a funk? Have PowerPoint presentations and PDFs lost their appeal? Are you hearing the line, "I wasn't trained on that!" too often? If so, we have some advice that may help you break the monotony of everyday training.
In 2010, the group responsible for training student consultants at the CITES Help Desk undertook a daunting task. We needed to detail each service and application we supported as well as all of our policies and procedures. Every facet of our business had to be recorded then imparted to a newly re-positioned and non-technical group of Help Desk consultants.
In teaching this information we discovered what we already knew, but could rarely physically demonstrate: a Help Desk consultant can never fully understand the scope of what we truly do. "I wasn't trained on that," becomes an unavoidable reality. So, our training took a different approach. Instead of focusing on the "facts" of our business as we had relied on heavily in the past, we invested more time in developing critical thinking, effective search habits, troubleshooting and problem solving skills. "You don't know everything but you can find anything," became an unofficial mantra.
Online coursework, job shadowing, lectures, and training games are just some of the methods that have been used in our training programs. This paper will explore the pros of each tool, but also show how they might be over-used, under-used or simply abused by the teacher or the student.
Index Terms
- But i wasn't trained on that!: the use and abuse of training tools
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