Category: General
Stuff that I just can’t make fit anywhere else.
You May Be Certifiable
(Addendum added Nov 6, 2011)
I keep getting myself in trouble. Let me be the first to admit it. And this time, it’s because I’m proud of the work I did, and I hate to see other people cheapen the meaning of it. In this case, we’re talking about the word “Certified”.
When you drive your car into a garage, you see signs for an ASE Mechanic. If you want to climb into the cockpit of a jet airplane, you’ve got to talk to a guy (or gal) who’s holding a CFI Rating. And, if you want to get into the server room at work, you’re gonna need a little something called an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) Certificate. (Full disclosure, I spent a good part of my career writing big complicated courses to teach people to get that last one — which hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people — now hold around the world.)
My point is, when you bill someone as being “Certified” in something, you’re saying to the public at large that you’re in some way reassuring them that this person can actually perform the tasks expected of them in a competent manner.
The ASE Mechanic can diagnose the problem with your car, order the parts, install them and then test your car and return it to you without giving you a dangerous vehicle.
The CFI Flight Instructor can teach your pilot how to fly an airplane in such a manner that you will be safe riding with them, and that if a problem arises they will professionally and quickly resolve it and land the airplane without you ending up a small grease spot on the pavement.
The Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer will be able to install, configure and diagnose your computer servers and systems so that your data is safe, your users are happy, and that that guy from Nigeria doesn’t get into your bank account.
Now, of course, there ARE organizations that provide “certification” of crystal ball gazers, balloon animal makers, and those who make sculptures out of dryer lint. Anyone can “certify” someone in a skill — coaching, finger-snapping, apple carving — and that’s their right. While I think it’s amusing, I don’t really have a big problem with them.
But a year or two ago, a Large Learning Organization (Let’s call it the “Amazing Society for Trivial Development” decided that the world needed them to “provide a way for workplace learning and performance professionals to prove their value to employers and to be confident about their knowledge of the field.”
Great! Sounds just like my definition above — reassuring, performance, competent…
Well, hold on there, Hoss. The bar’s not all that high. Here’s what you need:
1. Three years in a “related” field.
2. “Pass” a multiple choice test (which apparently has not been validated)
3. Submit a “sample” of your work (PPT deck? Drawing of you in a classroom?)
Oh — one other little thing. A check for $1,000 dollars. For a machine-scored test and to have a “blue-ribbon panel” look at your course plan?
Just for comparison, a Microsoft Certification test (for a single cert) right now costs around $200. And having it will immediately boost your income about 25% or more in most markets. Because the people who pass this test have to pretty much take a week of classes and then study really, really hard before they can pass.
If you got all five certs, you’d double your income. Those tests would be about $1000 out of your pocket. Probably a good deal.
So let’s get back to the Large Learning Organization. Do they have any documentation that their certification maps directly to more income? Well, they do claim that the Fortune 500 “prefer their candidates” but they don’t give any hard data. If there were actual stats, I bet they’d quote them.
But come on — who in their right mind would say these people are competent at what we do? E-learning? Instructor led? Webcasts? Curriculum Design? Needs analysis? Assessment? Social Media? Coaching? Psychometrics? Data Analysis?
But (from their own data) the LLO has now administered their test to 3,605 people and charged users about $1000 each. I’m not a math whiz, but that comes out to Three Million, Six Hundred and Five Thousand Dollars! Now they did have mimeograph costs for the multiple-choice tests, and they had to print up some nice blue ribbons for the panel, but other than that — pure profit. And people say Bernie Madoff was smart!
(Full Disclosure: They will give you a $200 discount on the test if you join the org or are a member. But that money just goes in another pocket, so I’m not discounting it.)
This causes an itch under my saddle because they’re supposed to be a Professional Learning Organization, and they should know better. If it was a bunch of Balloon Animal Professionals, I’d cut them some slack and say “Well, what do they know about training and certification?” But these people CLAIM to be the best and brightest. In fact, I bet some of them even HAVE this certification. (Interesting side note would be to see if EVERYONE paid full price, or if the insiders got it discounted or for free. I know what I’d be betting — how about you?)
So there you have it. Call me cranky, call me snarky, or call me somebody that’s proud of my profession. Proud of my skills. Proud of the people that I work with every day who really provide Training and Development at a high level of quality.
And embarrassed to be associated with a money-machine that grinds out pretty certificates.
Addendum: Several people have written me personally, asking why I hate people who have certifications from the Large Learning Organization, or think that those people don’t have skills in learning. PERISH THE THOUGHT! I’d bet that a large number of people who coughed up the $10000 fee for this overpriced and poorly-designed piece of irrelevant documentation are likely highly skilled learning professionals. I know several of them personally, and would recommend them highly, depending on what it is you wanted them to do.
The point is that this Four Letter Acronym really has nothing to do with whether they are skilled or not — it merely proves they can write a check and answer some multiple-guess questions. It’s not a certification for a potential client that they can actually provide the services that the client needs, or that they have the skills that map to the project at hand.
Were I at the beginning of my career, with no other evidence of my skill (like advanced degrees or client referrals) I’d probably hold my nose and write the check. But I’d have to take a shower every time I put the acronym after my name.
My Friend Wasn't Killed By Social Media
I lost a friend yesterday. Trey Pennington of Greenville — father, husband, grandfather, speaker, teller of stories and launcher of Social Media Clubs — could no longer fight the darkness and took his own life. Twitter and Facebook echoed with the stunned and shocked responses from his friends, acquaintances and those who had been helped by this kind and gentle man.
Less than 24 hours later, I’m already seeing the first jabs coming online, talking about how this loss may have been caused by The Interwebs. “Online Relationships just aren’t real.” “We need to connect with actual people.” “This Social Media stuff is all junk.”
What complete bunk.
If you know Trey, you know his demons were in the real world. People who deserted him, institutions that turned their back on him after years. I’m not giving details because he wouldn’t want me to.
But the online community — we loved him unconditionally. He had hundreds of thousands of people who knew him as a kind, helpful, thoughtful soul. He spoke around the world — most recently, here in Columbia a couple of weeks ago at my request. He did it at no charge. (A man who could command thousands of dollars for a single keynote appearance.)
We chatted, and put off dinner for another day because he was rushing home to work on a presentation the next day. We knew we had time, because he was feeling great. He’d lost weight, gotten tanned, and had all his dark demons at bay.
Then he returned to the real world. And it killed him.
I don’t doubt there are problems in the online world. But I’m not going to let people sully the legacy of my friend with this kind of shit. He made social media a better place for so many people, and we’re all worse off now that he’s no longer with us.
I hope there’s really good wireless up there on that cloud, buddy.
"Instruction Does Not Cause Learning…"
“Instruction does not cause learning; it creates a context in which learning takes place, as do other contexts. Learning and teaching are not inherently linked. Much learning takes place without teaching, and indeed much teaching takes place without learning.”
Serving Up Some Sacred Cows Of Learning
Yesterday I ran across an article in The Atlantic showing “The School Of The Future” that lives in a local YMCA. While they don’t seem to have a Quidditch field or a landing pad for flying cars, it sounded like a nice idea. Working with the community, sharing the pool, innovating in education — what’s not to love?
Then I came to the author’s contention that “Eighty percent of charter schools don’t produce better results than traditional public education. And sadly, some results are much worse.” While not labeled as “op-ed”, I’m guessing Kathleen Kennedy Townsend does have a particular axe she’s trying to sharpen, here.
Since I have a nodding familiarity with education, and more exposure to self-designated experts than is healthy for most adults, I wondered where this had come from. So I started doing some searching. And searching. Best I could do (‘cuz, of course, they don’t reveal SOURCES in the Atlantic) was some questionable research from a LARGE MAINSTREAM EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION that had numbers that looked a little bit like that, if you read really quickly and ignored the details. And the source. And didn’t ask any questions.
(I don’t have anything against experts. Really. Some of my friends are experts. I’d even let my daughter marry one, if she was the last woman on earth and had a trust fund.) But in this case, I think it might be useful to stop for a moment and talk about the process of measuring results. Something that we do a lot in my line of business.
If a client hires me to teach punch press operators to run their machines faster, one option is for me to just show them how to turn the speed dial up to “11” and step back. Job Done! The machines are now running faster, I’ve accomplished the goal, and I want my check. Ka-Ching!
(There will, of course, be a corresponding loss of fingers, an increase in damaged materials, lots of lawsuits, and explosions when the red-hot machines finally blow up — but I achieved my goal with 100% success!)
Still confused? Let’s make it even simpler. Let’s imagine that you’ve got a Dairy Barn. And you want “better results”.
Our goal is to get more milk from your herd. Each morning, we’ll measure how many gallons of milk you get from group “A” and how much from group “B” and see which is “BEST”. (Best, in this case, meaning more milk.)
At the end of the first week, Group “A” wins. With weak, runny milk because the foreman fed them food with lots of fluid. We couldn’t sell it because the fat content was so low, but there was more of it.
New goal — highest fat content.
At the end of week two, group “B” is the winner. The foreman ordered in extremely expensive food, which raised the fat content for the second group nice and high. But the cost per cow was triple what we usually pay, so we ended up selling the milk at a loss.
Week three — we aim for highest profits. And the foreman butchers all the cows and sells them at market, showing a huge profit. Oopsie.
So be careful when you hear people in Education talking about measuring results, or who gets “better results”. Without asking a lot of very specific questions, and without a lot of experience at designing and delivering actual education to actual people, you may get slaughtered.
Does My Business Really Need This Social Media Stuff?
One of the BizDev guys at my new shop wandered by the other day, and I asked him what he was hearing from his corporate folks that he called on about “Social Media”. He looked at me a little blankly, and responded “Not much at all.”
He said that to most of the corporate types he talked to, SM was pretty much a toy and they really didn’t understand why it would matter to their business, why they’d want to spend time on it, or why they’d want to be Tweeting or FaceBooking or whatever it is that the kids are all doing nowadays.
Truth hurts. Here I am rolling around in SM all day long, thinking that it’s the neatest thing since bread with the crust cut off, and it turns out that in South Carolina most of the guys in the nice suits think it’s something their daughters do on their little pink phones before their coming out parties.
My BizDev friend challenged me to give him a few short points that he could use with the folks he talked to, that would help them understand why Social Media was important to them.
And the hard part? It’s gotta be written in “Business” not in “Woo-Woo Awesome”.
1. You’re Already Using Social Media – You Just Don’t Know It
If you’ve got more than two employees (and they’re under 60), you’re already using social media. You just don’t know it. The average social media user is 39 years old.
Your employees are innocently posting things like:
- “I’m so proud that our tuna is now 95% Dolphin Free!”
- “I don’t think a few Toyotas exploding is such a bad thing – our dealership hasn’t had a single one explode, yet!”
- “Yeah, we had a problem with e-coli in our potato salad last week but we’ve cleaned all the dishes and the restaurant is ready to go!”
You need to have a Social Media strategy, a corporate policy, and guidance for employees. Now.
2. People Expect To Find You – If They Don’t, They Go Elsewhere
Your customers want you there. 93% of customers say they want businesses to be available through Social Media.
Customers look for your hours with their smartphone as they head to your store. They compare your product guarantee as they shop in another store for a similar product. And they look at reviews of your restaurant, hotel, or sewer service just before they call.
Your reputation is already out on the web, most likely. Someone has posted a review, a blog, or a Twitter comment about an interaction they’ve had with your business. If it was positive, you should be trumpeting it from the rooftops. If it was negative, you should be on top of it immediately – solving the problem, if possible. Minimizing the damage, otherwise.
Ask Target. Or United Airlines.
3.A Social Media Presence Is Like That Fire Extinguisher On Your Wall
You’ve got a shiny fire extinguisher on your wall, and you hope to hell that you’ll never need to use it. But every year, you have it tested – and if you’re smart, you train your employees how it works.
A solid SM presence is like that for your business. When disaster happens (your own little BP Oil Spill or Kentucky Fried Sink Bathers) you’re ready to manage communications and keep things from spiraling out of hand.
You can candidly communicate with your customers, sharing information transparently and quickly – not having let it get filtered and spun through the media.
Plus, your supporters (you’ll have supporters if you’re doing SM right – thousands of them) will come to your aid across the Internet and tell the truth about your company and who you really are.
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So, those are my top three points I’d send out to Corporate America.What would you add? Where have I gone wrong?
The Three Most Dangerous Words In Web Design: "Lorem, Ipsum, and Dolor"
If you’ve ever worked with a Web Designer (dangerous creatures who live in dark rooms, surrounded by monitors and empty cans of Red Bull and crumpled Twinkie wrappers) you’ve probably seen these strange words in the middle of the screen on your new web site:
“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. ”
Used by typesetters and designers since the 1960’s, this “filler copy” is meant to let you focus on the design elements of the page rather than worry about exactly what the copy will say. And, if you’re writing a brochure for Toyotas or a flyer about your lost cat, that’s all fine and good. But if you’re trying to design a blog, sales page or site for your community there’s a large problem.
You can’t properly design the look, feel and vibe of your site unless the designer can read the copy and experience the voice, tone, flavor and vibe of your copy. Let me offer three example opening paragraphs for the same web site, and you be the judge:
Bob’s Lugnut Emporium: Take #1
Welcome to Bob’s Lugnut Emporium. We are purveyors of fine lugnuts in southeastern Kansas (and the Oklahoma panhandle) for vehicles of all sizes. If you need lugnuts, or lugnut accessories, we can supply all your needs. We offer overnight delivery of lugnuts via Fedex and UPS. You can also visit our headquarters from 8AM to 5PM to pick up your lugnuts. Please call ahead to make sure that we have the nuts you need.
Bob’s Lugnut Emporium: Take #2
In today’s competitive business world, your team is striving to be the #1 performer in your market niche — and Bob’s Lugnut Emporium can be just the partner that you’re seeking. Our world-class experts are available to consult with you and provide business-class solutions that offer best-of-breed products providing proven best practices from threads to foot pounds. We’re the market leader and industry pioneer in our space, offering our patented Limited Unlimited Guarantee Service (LUGS) where each lugnut has an RFID chip connected to a GPS which electronically communicates to your SAB tracking system to instantly update your CIO on the ROI of the product.
Bob’s Lugnut Emporium: Take #3
If you’ve got big trucks, they’ve got tires. And if those tires fall off, you’ve got problems. Big problems. Missed deliveries, angry customers, huge repair expenses, and driver’s wages to pay with no deliveries being billed. We’re Bob’s Lugnut Emporium — and we know it’s about way more than lugnuts to you. That’s why every nut is tested twice. That’s why professional drivers choose our nuts 3:1 in surveys. And that’s why we offer a personal guarantee from our owner, Bob “Big Load” Johnson: “My product will beat the nuts off the competition.”
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So — would your web designer come up with a different looking web site for you, if they saw some of this copy before they put stylus to screen? You bet. These are three wildly different personas, voices, flavors and styles. (Yes, I’m exaggerating to make a point. So sue me.) But without having heard any of this you probably would have gotten a nice site with a big shiny lugnut on the top and some photos of tires.
So the next time you’re at the “design” stage of a project, go ahead and write some copy — even if it’s just a few pages — and stay away from the “Lorem, Ipsum, Dolor” stuff. You’ll be glad you did.
(BTW — the entire concept of this post was pretty much stolen from “Content Rules” — an amazing new book I’m reading by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman. Go buy it right now. Stop reading and do it. Hurry up.)
Sweet Dreams, Jack!
The other day my friend Naomi Dunford posted an absolutely lovely audio version of “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” that she read for her son Jack. Many people commented that it brought tears to their eyes, and great joy to their hearts.
So — always willing to jump on the bandwagon — I’ve recorded my own little bedtime reading for Jack, based on one of my favorite childhood memories.
Kid should be off to dreamland in minutes.
http://www.techherding.com/jack.mp3
In The End, All You've Got Is Your Good Name
I’ve just completed a very strange experience with a client. Well, she wasn’t actually a client — that would suppose that there had been an exchange of funds for services. In this case, there were many promises of funds, but none ever showed up. It’s not the first time that’s happened to me, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. And it’s not even the biggest lie I’ve ever been told — there was Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Federal Reserve.
No, in this case, there was just a string of phone calls and emails about the bright future I would have if I just “trusted” her. If I bought a plane ticket to her client site with my own money, if I started work without a deposit, if I kept revising my proposal over and over and over without ever getting a dime from her. I wouldn’t pony up the money for the plane ticket (not my first time at the rodeo) but I did buy her book, read up on her theories, prepped for a phone conference, participated in more calls and email, and generally wasted hours I’ll never get back.
(My wife, who’s the financial brains in the family, thought I was a fool. From the start she pegged this one for somebody who’d never pay up. But I’m a Minnesotan — our word is our bond, and if you say you’re gonna do something, you do it. And if you sign a freakin’ contract? Done deal, Bubba.)
This went on for three weeks. Finally, I called a halt and said unless she paid the deposit in the contract that she had signed — nothing more would happen.
She said she’d pay if I signed an NDA. Well, that’s pretty common, so I said sure. The agreement was if I signed the NDA she’d send the deposit via return mail. What’s the first clause in her NDA? That I never, ever disclose to anyone outside her team that I participated in the development and facilitation of a public event for 50 learning professionals. Huh? Was I going to wear a hood? I signed, but asked in the return email if she wanted to discuss exactly how this would work.
Suddenly, I was being unreasonable. We needed to talk. She had a partner who had to be consulted — we might even have to “start over from zero.” Ruh roh, Scooby. The next morning, I had an angry email in the inbox telling me the contract was “canceled” — and “since you haven’t done any work, I don’t owe you anything.”
I pointed her to the cancellation clause on my website, common to most freelancers. It says that if I can re-sell the time, I’ll refund your deposit. But my time is all I have to sell, and I’ve already told others I’m unavailable.
Is This A Teachable Moment?
Well, on the one hand, I suppose it should be. I saw right away that this person was pretty emotionally unstable. I’d known her for years — she’d actually been my employer for a bit quite a while back. And I don’t remember any of this kind of stuff. But now she kept changing her mind, spent hours trying to decide on spending $400 on an airfare, continually promised to send a check that never materialized, ignored emails — not at all the kind of behavior that gives you confidence in a professional relationship.
Maybe this is just a difficult time in her life. Maybe there are personal, physical or professional pressures on her right now that are causing this kind of erratic behavior. (I went through menopause with my wife of 14 years, and, at times, she was nuttier than I am normally.) Maybe the stress of starting a new company and striking out in a new direction have overwhelmed her — and somewhere down the road things would even out.
Twenty years ago, I’d be shouting “lawsuit” and bringing in the lawyers and enforcing every recourse that my contract entitles me to. Now, a little older and wiser, I just feel sad that people don’t realize that the learning world is a pretty small pond and that the ripples reach from edge to edge.
My Heart Will Go On: Social Media In The Enterprise
I just read a wonderful post by Jane Hart entitled “The Future Of Social Media In The Enterprise“. In it, she deftly describes an issue that I’ve been encountering often lately with potential clients who want to talk about using this game-changing paradigm-shifting bar-raising (insert your own favorite stupid marketing metaphor here) thing we call Social Media.
Her argument is quite elegant. If I may distill it, she feels that using Social Media tools only behind your firewall (not allowing employees to connect outside the company) is short-sighted. And that their real value is the cross-pollination and connection that comes from engaging across a discipline, around the world, and to people who see things in vastly different ways.
(I bet British Petroleum has a great internal forum to discuss how much time and money to spend when drilling really deep wells, and what to do when you get 700+ safety violations. But maybe, if they’d been more connected to reality, they wouldn’t have lost $17 BILLON DOLLARS and become the poster boy for dumb.)
I have to say, though, that I’m getting a little bit tired having this discussion with people who are extremely focused on keeping the fence up between their employees and the rest of the world. Stopping the dangers of Farmville, YouTube, and people randomly getting information they might use to improve their skills. It’s exhausting to keep having the same chat with the same network administrators. The same vendors who want to sell their custom “behind the firewall” solutions. The same tiny minds who think they have all sorts of special secrets about how they put their canned hams in the boxes and ship them out.
Would it make more sense for me to have a “pre-work” session, where there’s an assessment of some kind? And if the client is mostly focused on how to lock all the doors and bar all the windows — just smile and move along?
On Jane’s blog, I said it this way:
We try to run from or eradicate that which we do not understand. If we can’t kill it, we try to control it and limit the access of others.
Probably true with the first cave-person who found fire. Still true in corporate America today. I have to admit that I, personally, am actually getting a little tired of having this discussion with potential clients and people who ask for advice.
I want to just say “Whatever” and move on to someone who’s open to new ideas and things that might help them. (Kind of a lifeboat drill — if I’ve only got so many years left, do I spend them arguing with people about the VALUE of parachutes or just HAND OUT parachutes to as many people as possible before the crash?)
It’s actually kind of exhausting. Like trying to convince my mom that “unlimited long-distance” actually meant she could talk to me as long and as often as she liked.
Never won that one, either.
So what do you think? Do you want a parachute, or should we keep talking about the nuts and the in-flight movie?
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