An Orderly Retreat

Today, one of my colleague-friends reminded me of a quip that I had made awhile back. He is a fairly new designer and had been beaten out of his last ditch in a losing battle over content with a SME. I told him, "Look, at this point, you need to stop worrying about the value of the content and focus on the delivery. If you can prove that the learner learned what you taught him then, if the knowledge is not applied to the job, you can make the argument that there was a problem with the content." Apparently he valued that advice.

Which reminds me, another colleague-friend has been helping his wife maximize training that her department is rolling out. Her job had hired a third-party, whose work was terribly sloppy. In the latest development, the user's computers kept crashing because a CBT requires the latest version of Flash. Nobody at the "Learning" "Development" company had thought of that before the program was rolled out. I feel that I am pretty tolerant of errors - people make mistakes mostly because they are missing information. Supply the information and, next time around, the problem won't happen again. But, come on now, not thinking through the implication of the technology they chose to use? That's abysmal.

In response to this craziness, my friend has suggested the "Pull your head out of your @$$ award." It is to be awarded to the Designer/Developer who makes the dumbest decisions when creating training. I think that's a great suggestion, but we'd have create categories. Otherwise there'd be too many ties.