Training Alliance Feb 2012 by Studio 7 Communications

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Tr aining Alliance magazine Vol. 1 - Issue 1 - Feb. 2012

www.trainingalliance.ca

Since its creation, Studio 7 has strived to provide unique and valuable services that on occasion may have seemed a little eccentric, especially when paired up with the depth and educational value of the content our clients demand. But the success is often outstanding. The Team at Studio 7 thrives on two key principles: the pursuit and application of new and interesting knowledge, and the art of sharing that knowledge in ways that are both engaging and fun for the audience. In a nutshell, we truly believe that learning CAN be fun. In the process of applying these principles, we've built a strong reputation as a turnkey solutions agency that mixes and matches some of the best ideas in corporate training, branding, communications and online strategies. I am extremely proud of my team and every project that bears our stamp as both live up to, and time and again surpass, our clients' expectations. Training Alliance Magazine is a new chapter in our ongoing service offerings that is meant to give back to our faithful and future clients the keys to better understanding what we do, how we do it and why we do it so well. Welcome to Studio 7. Welcome to Training Alliance. Edouard Rotondo President Studio 7 Communications

Welcome to the launch edition of Training Alliance Magazine. Training Alliance is a bi-monthly online magazine dedicated to providing corporate training professionals, instructional designers, and business people of all venues with engaging and enlightening articles that will help them improve their knowledge base and excel in their fields. Our content will focus on the role of learning and communications in business and how new techniques and technologies are becoming integral to how businesses communicate, educate, and learn. The Studio 7 Communications team is composed of educators, technology professionals, instructional designers, creative artists and business entrepreneurs. Our approach is to apply the sum of our experience to the topics we present, and provide our readers with current, relevant and useful information about the diverse aspects of training and instructional design â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and how these relate to business success. Our goal is to become a touchstone, a springboard, and a destination resource for everyone who has a passion for innovation, and an ongoing desire both to educate and also to learn. Sincerely, The Studio 7 Communications team

SPOTLIGHT: GETTING TO KNOW SARAH SNIDERMAN Instructional designer Sarah Sniderman shares some strategies for e-learning success.

ADOPTING TABLET TECHNOLOGY: PLAYING THE ODDS AND COMING OUT ON TOP How tablet technology can benefit your organization today. by Eric Wrazen

GRAPHIC COMMUNICATIONS: BECAUSE DESIGN IS NO TOSS OF THE DICE! Learn the basics of design and why it matters to you. by Edouard Rotondo

Contributions are welcome. Do you have an article or column idea you would like to submit to Training Alliance Magazine? Please e-mail a synopsis along with your bio to: submissions@trainingalliance.ca

TRAINING ALLIANCE MAGAZINE - FEBRUARY 2012

THE ODDS ON TRAINING: WHICH APPROACH WILL INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF SUCCESS? Formal, informal, or both? How to decide what will work for you. by George Saridakis

It’s 2012 and the touch-screen tablets are virtually everywhere. You can’t spend an hour watching television or surfing the web without seeing an ad or a reference to them along the way. You can’t walk into a café in any major city without passing at least one person totally engrossed in whatever they are doing with this shiny silver black rectangle. Desktops. Laptops. Cell phones. Smartphones. They all dramatically changed the way we work and ultimately, the way our work shapes our business. Tablet technologies and the iPad in particular are now shaping the next evolution of business practices. Of course, there is always some risk involved with adopting new technologies, but the first phase of technology early adopters made the iPad the dominant tablet on the market in 2010, and other tablet makers hit the market hard in 2011 with competitive products. With millions of iPads and tablets flying off store shelves and thousands of Apps covering every productivity task imaginable, the true risk now is not that the tablet might not apply to your business, but is your business failing to embrace it quick enough.

PLAYING THE ODDS:

ADOPTING TABLET TECHNOLOGY: PLAYING

“Tablet technologies and the iPad in particular are now shaping the next evolution of business practices.” 02

Take the market-leading Apple iPad as an example. There are clear and simple benefits that the iPad can provide to you and your enterprise: • Engage your staff: Almost everyone loves a new toy. Adding a new gadget to explore will certainly fire up the forward-thinking members of your staff. • Promote learning: Everything an employee learns on the job can be a benefit to their own growth and a benefit to the business as well. Developing a new skill like iPad white boarding or content sharing will bring long term returns in employee knowledge and satisfaction.

• Make play time productive time: It’s a mobile world, and there’s no doubt you have staff that spend a fair amount of time travelling in it. The iPad is the ideal device for changing downtime into productive time. The portability, extended battery life, and HD screen of the iPad puts it way ahead of laptops and smartphones in flexibility and ease of use while on the go. • Put the “I” in your team: While the iPad itself is generally a single-user device, there are a multitude of Apps on the market that focus on collaborative activities like information sharing, social

gaming, and collaborative project management. These apps can encourage your staff to improve their collaborative efforts and help build or improve your company’s team spirit. • Become a visionary: There has always existed a perceived value in being an “early adopter” when it comes to new technology. When your sales or marketing team is the first to walk into a client’s boardroom with an entirely fully iPad-based presentation – it will certainly have an impact. When your team is the second, or the third to do so…. that impact is clearly diminished.

THE ODDS AND COMING OUT ON TOP

These are just some examples of ways to benefit from iPad adoption in the short term. Android and Windows-based tablets are quickly gaining market share by offering alternative hardware options. The App market for these new tablets will explode in 2012, offering an even wider range of productivity tools for the tablet-enabled business. With some of these new tablets driving prices below the cost of the average laptop, investing in tablet technology for your outbound sales and marketing staff isn’t really a roll of the dice: the immediate productivity and personal development improvements you’ll see will make it seem more like a straight flush. TRAINING ALLIANCE MAGAZINE - FEBRUARY 2012

Because Design is No Toss of the Dice!

Communications:

Gr aphic 04

All businesses, great and small, have an image. An image that their clients talk about, that represents their products and services and that, hopefully, is recognized. It is not to be gambled with. The corporate image is conveyed through every form of advertising at the company’s disposal: a web site, a press kit, a portfolio, even a business card. It is every business person's dream that their business have a positive and impactful image. However, many companies settle for looking “just good enough”: Just good enough for their name to be seen, just good enough to be functional, just good enough to fit in. Advertising is all about communication. Be it digital or hard copy, your business needs to communicate. One way or the other, it WILL communicate. The question remains: is your image communicating what you want customers to know?

“Is your image communicating what you And the truth is, not everyone is creative. We don't have the time, the insight, or the experience to be creative and, frankly, it's not our job to be. The negative impact of this is that many businesses don't realize that by failing to establish the right creative communications strategy, they may be communicating an image that doesn't represent who they are and what their business can provide.

Here are some general guidelines to help you out. Create a Unique Concept By giving your company or your project the opportunity to stand out, you will effectively: • Make it easy to understand your message • Promote higher interest in your message and, therefore, better retention • Better segment your target audience • Just make your stuff more fun and interesting to look at

Having a Communications Strategy is important Remember these 3 rules of engagement when it comes to a communications strategy:

want customers to know?”

• It must be sustained: build your communications strategy over 12-18 months so that each initiative builds into the previous and grows over time. • It must provide new information over time: repetition is nice, but your clients will get bored fast. Let people in on your secrets over time, and focus on each one as you go with more gusto! • It must reﬂect your company's quality index: it's all about image. If your product or service is good, make sure your marketing tools look just as good so that your image is strong.

Even Training Can Look Good Believe it or not, you may get better training results if your training looks good. Why? • Calibration of screen space: Information will be better presented on screen • Reducing cognitive load: The right images can deliver the right message instead of using a lot of words • Tie-in to your communications plan: if you brand your training, you can tie it in to your training communications strategy and increase hype and interest over it • Learner buy-in: the learners may be able to better relate to your message if you tailor your design to their experiences (e.g. case studies that use illustrated characters representing some of your staff).

And remember, bad design can cost just as much as good design. Even more if the impact is negative. TRAINING ALLIANCE MAGAZINE - FEBRUARY 2012

THE ODDS ON TRAINING Which approach will increase your chances of success?

f there is one drawback to living in an era of wondrous possibilities, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the frustration of not knowing which one is best for you. This paradox of choice has not spared the world of training, where a plethora of formats and methodologies abound. How do you know which way your training should go? Knowing the playing field and the activity that goes on in its various areas can go a long way in putting the odds of success in your favor.

Making Sense of it All Truth be told, training methods are often dictated by budgets and upper management predispositions, but in our increasingly malleable society, organizations are becoming more open to adjusting their training paradigms, which means that more than ever, the choice of how your company trains may very well fall in your hands. While numerous training tools and modalities exist, the choice of your direction can be much simplified by thinking of general training approaches, which fall into two categories: formal and informal.

Formal Training

Informal Training

Formal training by nature is highly structured, and dictates to you what you are to learn from it. It is typically characterized by a curriculum painstakingly divided into units, each with their own objectives, assessments, and specific contributions to the general purpose of the training.

Informal training, conversely, is the learning land of the free-spirited soul. This format can easily be exemplified by the web, that can offer any number of articles, videos, and podcasts on any subject the learner desires. This pertains not only to personal learning, but also to online learning environments that virtually unite learners of a common interest to a repository of resources and activities.

The frequent complaint about formal training is that it tends to ignore or stifle the individual interests and learning preferences of its learners. It continues to thrive however, because many environments, such as the manufacturing industry, need to prioritize collective performance over individual exploration. Their directive to outshine the competition drives them to measuring results with metrics, not only for their own sake, but for those of auditors, who hold such companies to high standards in the interest of their clients.

Down the Middle With the prior two camps established, it must be noted that in reality, the choice of design is not so much a fork in the road as it is a spectrum where a middle ground exists. This can be the case for example in sales, where employees are held to specific quotas and have some degree of introductory training, but are left thereafter to hone their skills on their own through books, CDs, or other supplementary resources. Finding What Works for You In essence, the degree of training formality you should adopt for your company will be related to the degree it needs to produce precise results. Training companies are an asset for providing further guidance and customizing your approach, in that from their experience, they can provide concrete instances of formal and informal training. As such, they are capable of tailoring your training approach to your specific needs.

TRAINING ALLIANCE MAGAZINE - FEBRUARY 2012

SPOT LIGHT

GETTIN

Sarah

“Spotlight” will be a regular feature of Training Alliance Magazine. Each issue will profile a new learning professional or contributor to the learning profession. These interviews will provide insight into the concepts, strategies and practices that people in “the Bizz” employ to provide exceptional learning experiences.

Sarah Sniderman is an instructional designer who specializes in developing corporate instructional programs in a range of industries, from pharmaceuticals and transportation to retail and banking. From her home base in Montreal, Canada, Sarah has established an international clientele with her strength in combining solid instructional design principles with robust e-learning solutions. In addition to her corporate work, Sarah is also enlightening the next generation of educators as an instructor at Concordia University. Her course curriculum includes Principles of Educational Message Design and Evaluation of Educational Materials.

NG TO KNOW

h Sniderman ________________________________________ What advice would you offer to a company undertaking an e-learning project for the first time?

________________________________________ As an instructional designer, what is different about designing an online module compared to a face-to-face class?

I think the most important thing is to prepare learners for the experience. Even if similar objectives are being achieved online rather than in the classroom, the experience itself is very different. Online, the learner usually works alone and is free to start, stop and revisit content as desired. Typically there is no one to address questions as they arise in real-time. Be sure to provide additional support, such as a communication plan that reinforces what is coming, why it is important and how learners will benefit. Offer facilitated sessions post-training if appropriate, to support those who are less comfortable in the new medium. The more clearly expectations are established, the more likely learners will succeed, and ultimately the better performance you can expect on the job.

What I really enjoy about e-learning is the chance to work with experts in a range of fields. When developing materials for a face-to-face class, an instructional designer will work with subject matter experts, probably a project manager, and hopefully a graphic designer for the slides and handouts. But in the e-learning environment, there are so many factors that influence learning design. Could an animation better illustrate the concept? What interactions are possible? Will the learner know how to access supplementary content? We need to design to possibilities we might not understand well ourselves, but can be reached through the vicarious expertise of graphic designers and illustrators, animators, programmers and usability testers.

________________________________________ What do you see as the best balance between traditional training and e-learning when it comes to training resources?

________________________________________ You have a reputation for making well-designed training products. What advice would you give to those who want to improve their training processes and strategies?

In each case, the choice of medium depends on what you want someone to learn to do; the specific knowledge, skills and attitudes a learner needs to acquire and practice before they can demonstrate them on the job. Oh, and budget...! But ideally, performance requirements determine medium.

TRAINING ALLIANCE MAGAZINE - FEBRUARY 2012

Know the business, and always consider real-life application in your learning design. Keep in mind that the devil is in the details; typos, misspellings and careless errors destroy credibility with learners, clients and colleagues. And at the end of the day, learners want to enjoy the experience. Put yourself in their shoes. No matter the content, make learning relevant, engaging and memorable.

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