Two weeks ago I attended a conference (Megacomm 2012) that was aimed at both marketing and technical communicators. This was a whole day event and it got me thinking about the validity of this sort of bonus day out. Is it worth the cost to a company to finance their employees going to these conferences or is it a waste of their money. The said employee gets a chance to network, which in and of itself is a double-edged sword. He is as likely to gain something useful for his company as he is to find a new company.
I expect to gain very little in the way of new information, although sometimes it is useful to hear the “bleeding obvious” stated by someone else. On the other hand, I have a few years under my belt working for different companies, using different methodologies etc. so I regard myself as fairly savvy about the world in which I work. Others, with a smidgen less experience can gain quite a lot in the way of ideas – how others do things, confidence – they are not the only ones fighting with Microsoft Word numbering, specific problem resolution – assuming there are things that you find problematic, and of course lots of weight gain – the food at these events is (nearly) always better than the fare otherwise consumed in the workplace.
This conference lived up to all my expectations. Of the four sessions I attended, one dealt with documentation – becoming more efficient, one with training – converting documentation to courseware, one dealt with marketing analytics and one was a self-treat – how to best maximize free use of LinkedIn. My favourite was the training session, since it was so bad it ended up as funny. For example, during the session, someone asked a question to which the lecturer replied that all questions should wait until the end. Two slides later this same lecturer stated that a good presentation has to engage the participants via interactive questions and answers. Go figure.
The session outlining how to make the documentation process more efficient added nothing new to what I am already doing, but was extremely well presented and covered so many of the bases that it must have been brilliant to the less experienced. And even I need reminding of the “bleeding obvious” from time to time. This was definitely worth the time.
More and more documentation is being supplied in new formats, like YouTube videos or interactive wikis. Training is now often done via webinars instead of via a frontal course. So the marketing lecture on using analytics to see how well received your product/website/whatever is received by the outside world has a very practicable overlap with documentation trends.
All in all, it was a nice day out.
It used to be that I was against sending any of my employees to these things because of the lack of anything useful that could then be utilized in their daily slog. Now I realize that this type of bonus day out is exactly that. It doesn’t have to have a payback, but it is something that the employee wants and is thankful for, potentially increasing loyalty to the company and also giving an incentive to work better in the future.
So the overall verdict? A very acceptable waste of time, that does pay out dividends – go for it.
The Write Way 
Managers who fail to send employees on training days are missing an opportunity
– to get employees to feel good about their boss and the company,
– consolidate what they know
– remind them of the “bleeding obvious”, which because it is “bleeding obvious” they’ve forgotten (and so got into bad habits)
– add new skills or up-date material that’s changed since they started (e.g. how to make an interactive document / youtube / wikis, etc.).
So often I get people asking me about OLD software that has been updated / replaced. However because people only see / know what is used in their own companies they may not realise that this is now out-of-date. Sometimes their company doesn’t know – as they were sold it by a salesman claiming it was state-of-the-art and don’t realise that in 3 years, state-of-the-art becomes legacy product. Sometimes they don’t want to know because of the cost and effort of replacing what works, but doesn’t work as well as a replacement would. (Typical in this is relational database technologies used for big-data applications. It’ll work – just about).
As for your guy on training – take him out and shoot him. The only time I’d say “ask questions later” is when answering the question will give something away e.g. the answer to an exercise OR will be introduced properly within 5 minutes. Saying “ask questions at the end” is pointless (unless you are 5 minutes to the end and summing up).
The key to attending any training event is to select the right one for the right staff i.e. level of experience and needs should match the course.
I’ve done training where a few people quickly realised that the course was wrong for them. This is ugly for them – as they become bored. It’s worse for the trainer as they may become disruptive and their bad feeling rubs off on others. So a good trainer tries to engage them. The problem can then be that the other attendees don’t gain as much or get lost. I’ve had ratings at courses where out of 10 I’d get 70% giving me 8, 9 or 10 and the remainder giving me 1, 2 or 3. Nothing in the middle. In every case this has happened, I knew straight away who were the 1-3 people as they’d showed it from the start that they didn’t want to be there. Unfortunately you can’t really tell them to go back to work as they shouldn’t be here. They’ve paid and their boss wants them to attend. So don’t send junior staff on an advanced level course – or vice versa.
Comment by Arthur Weiss — March 1, 2012 @ 5:31 pm |
I totally agree. For me, going to this conference was “Principe” – the principle of the thing that my boss knows that one day out of the year over 200 Israeli technical writers get together and learn, share, network and yes, enjoy talking shop over a good meal. My SMEs seemed a bit confused as to what I was actually going to learn there, I mean, don’t I already know how to read and write English?! I showed them all the brochures I picked up and they all went “Ah.” They should really know that our job is more than formulating grammatcially correct, well spelled sentences. See you next year!
Comment by Aliza B. — March 4, 2012 @ 9:10 am |