A Field Report on Great Training

I thought I would be interrupting our series on Transitions this week with a “report from the classroom”. I spent the past four days attending AIIM’s Electronic Records Management (ERM) Master certificate training. Having already completed the ECM Master course, I knew the class would be great and I knew I wouldn’t be able to wait to talk about it. As it turns out, this class was also a perfect example of the use of transitions.

Teaching a four day technical class takes a special kind of instructor under the best of circumstances. In my opinion, the best of circumstances would be a class on a judging beach volleyball; did I mention this was a class on Records Management? Our instructor, Carl Weise, pulled it off with ease.

Like any good instructor, Carl began with great material; since it was prepared by AIIM, I wasn’t expecting anything less. Still, 32 hours of even great material can be painful if the class isn’t engaged, and keeping the class involved and motivated to participate falls to the instructor. Carl started off like another great instructor I know (see Mark’s comments from earlier post) by taking a few minutes to learn a little bit about his students and why we came to the course. Then he began to adapt. From that point forward, examples were tailored to our backgrounds, and our industries. He encouraged discussions, and if they didn’t occur spontaneously, he started them. These transitions kept us awake, kept us participating and gave us the chance to share our experiences and learn from each other. I’m not sure if he was testing our understanding, as Guila suggested last week, but he was certainly gathering information. I lost track of the number of times Carl wove our discussions into his examples in a later topic. The class, which could have been a dry presentation of several hundred slides, became a dynamic exchange that seemed written for the students in the room. I am finishing this blog post before leaving for the last day of this course and I can honestly say I am eager to get to class – remember, this is Electronic Records Management.

Whenever I am in a class like this, I take three sets of notes. One set is the stuff I need to remember for the exam and case study required to get the ERM Master certificate. The second set is the things I need to remember to work into our implementation (see my other blog) and the third is ways I can improve as a trainer. As I mentioned two weeks ago when I started this series, I am changing our in-house training program to incorporate transitions and I am planning to adapt my presentation based on the input I receive from the students. I saw some great examples of exactly what I hope to achieve, I only hope I can pull it off as well.

In the off chance that it still needs to be said, if you need training in ECM, ERM, BPM or any of the subject areas that AIIM covers, check out the AIIM web site and find a way to attend one of their classes. You will be very happy you did!