Those Who Can't, Teach 

Late on Wednesday, I was asked in passing if I would mind basically being the guinea pig for a new training technique we're trying at work. We're growing pretty rapidly, so we're constantly bringing in new folks, folks who don't necessarily come from a web/hosting background (or sometimes even from an internet background). Putting aside for the moment whether or not that's a good thing, the goal is to do some formal "classes" where anyone can come attend an entry level class learning about DNS or mail or FTP or the web. These will be recorded and can be reviewed by anyone later on. We'll do some online tests and those who pass can then take the more advanced classes.

My topics were the aforementioned DNS and mail.

It's an interesting idea, if a bit idealistic. The idea has its own set of problems, but I was a) a bit excited that I got asked to do it, and b) optimistic that it would be at least a little more effective at getting folks up to speed than our current training, which sometimes assumes a base level of understanding and vocabulary.

So, I decided I would try to do it as well as I could, and not wing it like I usually do. I train a good bit as part of my job. Project Managers at my company end up training the rest of the company on how our apps work when we're rolling them out. Candidly, that should be the Product Managers role (and in some cases, they do fill it), but it's just never really been the prerogative of the company to have Product Managers tasked with that requirement.

Regardless, I train a good bit, and I just wing it, which often leads to moments of "well, when we fix this bug, this will work this way ... for now, let's just *pretend* it worked." I'm not terribly fond of my public speaking skills, which include a lot of "umm" and "ahh" and "well", but I'm pretty proud of my ability to react on the fly and adjust when things aren't going well. I also introduce a lot of humor (well, attempts at humor) in an attempt to distract from my sometimes below par speaking skills and to help at least keep people engaged in what can be dry material.

(Note: by humor, I should mean referencing 80s TV shows, talking about how swirling your mouse makes things run faster, making pubs. I don't mean that I'm actually funny. I'm not.)

This time needed to be different. It needed to be a legitimately strong presentation, with structure and flow. Of course, I didn't have a whole lot of time to prep (given that I still needed to do my real job). I spent Wednesday night on the treadmill at the gym going through the basic premise of what I would do. I spent Friday morning writing some bulleted notes which I turned into a NeoOffice presentation.

The training started at 2pm and, other than talking a bit too fast, I think I pretty much nailed them. Since I had notes and a basic flow, I didn't spend much time wondering where I was going. I tied the mail presentation into DNS. I dropped out of the presentation to take people through a Terminal-based SMTP and POP session. I even threw in the good old AOL "You've Got Mail" sound. 2 hours of training, minimal screw ups, questions answered on the fly. I think for the first time in a very long time, I was actually not embarrassed by my speaking abilities or my attempts of humor to cover them up.

I'm kinda lucky to have such a varied job (programming, managing, training, documenting, and more).

Wow, this was a complete ego-stroke post here. I'll write about something more interesting next.