I’m going to go explain some ways in which training should be characterized for your success. The basis for my hints and tips is from my own experience of when things went well, and when things went less well than they could have done in deployment projects.
My experience is not limited just with Capital. It’s quite a few years ago now, but I used to support other types of enterprise applications – including delivering training. Yes, I did even teach Unix systems administration courses at one time. And yes, one of the memories etched on my mind is feedback from a training course (inventory management and demand forecasting) that I as a trainer had insufficient depth of knowledge of the subject matter. You can imagine how motivating that was for future gigs as a trainer to make sure that criticism would not happen again. Especially as, being honest with myself, and being respectful of the customer’s point of view, I could accept what was being said.
You can be reassured that Capital training materials are developed and delivered by subject matter experts with a terrific amount of knowledge and skills.
Realistic
To hold a systems engineer’s attention or to keep an electrical platform design engineer engaged, retain a harness release engineer’s or a manufacturing engineer’s attention requires avoiding inflicting irrelevant tuition. Harness release engineers may not be so much interested in the content of device interface control documents as a systems engineer would be, for example. With training a student often returns back to the “what’s in it for me” question, especially when the knowledge one is invited to take on strays upstream or downstream of the normal domain of their own job in the workflow of their organization.
Similarly, an aspect of relevance is that the examples used relate to the type of finished product of the daily experience of the students. Aircraft companies expect training on data sets which have meaning for them. Auto company staff will find it hard to relate military specification connectors too – what works best is something relevant to one’s own circumstances. However good training is a very significant contribution to an implantation project’s success. And for training to be better than good, the preparation, execution and follow-up need all to be first-class.
Specific
Some engineers work alone so it makes sense for them to work through exercises alone, other exercises may mimic the group work needed, so small teams may be more appropriate for the learning which takes place. At some training courses for Capital in the classroom, and certainly when using the Mentor Learning Center a student has been provided with body of knowledge designed to help many other users, from different organizations. For some types of user – systems administrators or librarians, this means that there is a sub-set of functionality in the Capital software which they will master by a deeper exploration than other users.
For others being trained – more likely in the context of Capital Logic or Capital Harness XC training it is better to have a group experience. And when your role is to produce design or manufacturing diagrams of an electrical platform and you are an early adopter – you should become acquainted at a generic level with a super-set of the functionality. As the deployment of the software tool proceeds it is common for a leading group of expert users to make the transition for their organization from generic understanding to specific.
Very likely it is the responsibility of early adopters to pass on the what subsequent users need to learn. This is captured in internal training courses and internal best practice documentation. Mentor Graphics can help you make this transition from general to specific applicability of the learning experience with professional services. Usually a company training more than 20 or 30 staff to use an advanced IT tool suite invests their home-grown talent in developing specific training materials. Part of the internally developed training (Mentor Graphics’ Professional Services staff can also assist in making a custom training course for you) advantage will be that the designs, the library data sets and the exercises will be production realistic for you.
The first wave of students uses generic data designed to expose the core functionality of interest. Subsequent waves of trainees may use custom-crafted data sets more exemplifying their daily work-reality.
Capital Application Engineer training MGC Wilsonville Feb 2009
Personal
Sadly, it has been on a rare occasion my experience when delivering training courses to have students who were disinclined to learn. Without motivation little learning takes place. A personal understanding of what is the value of the course to their own career, seems to me a reasonable expectation. Sometimes, students are uneasy about the change in work practices which inevitably follow a refresh of processes, or a new design paradigm being adopted. This is a problem of management and leadership to resolve. Sometimes it is simply a matter of communicating that being delegated to attend a training course is acknowledging a person’s talent to be selected as an early adopter. In the best managed projects, people come motivated to learn and understanding that they have a responsibility to use the time wisely.
In recent years I’ve seen many new Mentor co-workers who came from jobs supporting other software systems into the Capital team. I have watched them learn Capital. Their enthusiastic response was refreshing. That’s a testimony to the quality and breadth of the Capital system.
Most people love stability and have some resistance to change. However learning new things, and mastering new skills is also beloved by most people. Who doesn’t like an adventure? Trainees should also be enthused that mastering the Capital body of knowledge comes with personal, professional, workgroup and corporate benefits. Yes, there will be challenges, as with any worthwhile endeavor. But the issues are not the project. The project is usually succinctly described as “to become impressively more automated, significantly more efficient”.
So let’s start, do the training, make sure you quantify those benefits, mitigate the risks and get going to biff the competition.
Consolidated and timely learning.
If you don’t use it, you lose it. Most people get it to have training one week and then wait four months with no time to follow-up means that your preparedness will be awful. So most people take application software training one or two weeks before using it. That’s a good move. A lesser known tip is to make sure that you take notes when going through training.
Finding the information you want from these documents is easier if you take notes during the class.
When you do classroom training you are provided with extensive workbooks, lab and exercise sheets. Three weeks afterwards, you will be reading the pages without much recollection of how the information is organized, referring to the table of contents, going to chapters and reading paragraphs which aren’t relevant to your questions. If you make your own notes, write in the margins, insert your own summaries, highlight significant things to you, supplemental information provided by you makes more sense of the things for you. Your notes personalize and consolidate the learning for you. In my experience delivering the training, being actively involved in processing the material as you are learning it, by taking notes helps tremendously. Notes can be mind-maps, flow-charts, diagrams, doodles – and they get you a better absorption rate for the information.
Some training information is delivered in a lecture demonstrate-then-do-it-yourself form. Don’t be passive and expect the knowledge to be acquired just like wetness is achieved by being out in a rainstorm. Notes are an active participation, help a personal commitment to learning. Re-reading training course books isn’t efficient learning re-cap. Reading through your own notes is efficient re-learning which may then refer you back to the training course materials.
Internal Mentor Application Engineer Training 2016 now has many more Subject Matter Experts than even seven years ago.
Next post, I will end with some remarks about Capital training follow-up being better when it is not a solitary activity. Mentor’s internal staff training get-together happens at least once a year. There are plenty more now in the team. As a group again this February we enjoyed some relevant teaching with authentic learning. And then went out to party.