I recently attended a conference where there was a presentation about training methods, particularly for organizations.
The presenter put up a slide explaining that on-line training through self-instruction or watching videos was not really successful. They said one university had done a study looking at the brain patterns of people watching videos on social media and they were almost identical to brain patterns from people playing slot machines in a casino. OK, a lot of videos on TikTok and YouTube are more entertainment than training and can be addictive like gambling, but this does make the point that this type of training does not work for a lot of people.
The presenter then went on to say that they did have success with a more problem-based hands-on approach to training where each student was assigned a project to work on with a mentor and to produce a final solution that could be published as a self-training guide on a web site.
This caught my attention because not only have we, at InfoSol, been following that approach with our own Business Intelligence Institute for new people joining us, but we have seen a distinct uptick from our customers requesting more of a knowledge transfer/consulting approach to training. The approach is one of the customer drives and we, the experts, navigate or guide.
Last month, we had one customer wanting to learn how to convert a BO universe from the UNV format to UNX. Although this is covered in our 2-day IDT training course, a much more effective way was to set up three 2-hour hands-on knowledge transfer sessions with the customer and actually convert one of their universes with them. They not only learned how to do it, they actually did it themselves during the sessions!
This approach also works really well with InfoBurst Squirrel, the no-code application development tool for building value calculators, write back and mobile apps. Again, we offer a 2-day hands-on training course for InfoBurst Squirrel but have found the learning to be far more successful by doing 6 sets of 2-hour hands-on knowledge transfer sessions where the customer gets to actually build a working application in their own environment. This way they both have a tangible useful running application as a template for building further applications as well as learning how to use the tool by doing rather than just watching and listening.
The knowledge transfer training method works best with a small group of people, usually 1 to 3 and no more than 4. Each person can work hands-on creating while the instructor monitors through Teams or Zoom switching screen sharing as required. There are no course manuals or step-by-step instructions being followed as the concept is for the person learning to try and do on their own (actually just do as the great Jedi Yoda said, “there is no try”!!).
At this year’s annual IBIS BusinessObjects conference, we plan to use this approach with the hands-on labs we are offering for the new BI 2025 release.
This new training approach is being made available for all InfoSol training offerings alongside both regular instructor-led training courses and short training video tutorials that we offer with the SpeakBO EXTRA and PLUS subscriptions.
Let’s see how this new training trend goes.
