Peer training inside organizations can be very effective

In one organization I was working with, there was a desire to improve overall coding skills. The guys had used some external training sessions, but as most often those were in such a general level, that those didn't give much value to the environment they were working in. We started to think about solutions for the problem.

Team had couple of people who were thought to be gurus, who could easily train the others, but as always, the gurus were also the busiest guys in the organization. Creating a proper training takes lot of time and effort. Anyone who have ever created tailored training sessions, know that it takes at least 5-10 times more time to create the training than keeping it. If the training is for 2 hours, you easily need 10 hours of work on creating it.

So the answer didn't lay on the gurus. We also did have a look for external tailored training, but there wasn't much of a budget prepared for this. And also, the external trainers are never as effective as internal ones. So we decided to try peer training. We decided that everyone in the team needs to keep one session to everyone. At that point, we came up with an idea of taking few valued books of the subject and divided chapters from the book to be the subject areas people had to make their training sessions.

In addition there was created a good template for the training. Template made people to explain the basic theory from the book and then it was made mandatory to bring examples from their own production code as a reference learning for the training.

Exercise was successful. Of course people were hesitant in the beginning, but the feedback after the sessions was good. One of the best ways to learn is to teach. When you have to teach others, you have to know the subject much better than you will ever learn from any training sessions.

This example was from actual coding, but in can easily be taken in to use in different professions. I believe the ability to take learning from a valued book and consider and show the examples from organizations daily life is really beneficial. Experienced external trainers are excellent in keeping the atmosphere and proofing points, but they rarely know enough about the daily life to actually be able to make a change to stick.

I have experience in doing tailored training sessions. I've kept close to 50 sessions during change projects inside companies. Even though I normally know quite much about the companies, the challenges people have and the practicalities, still I've seen that my teachings are much more effective when there is internal experts backing me up.

I highly recommend this practice to all teams. I can guarantee it works. It might work differently than you think, but it will definitely make people to learn and find ways to improve.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review - Mindset:The New Psychology of Success

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck is a book about learning. It's a book about how people can learn their whole life when believing in learning and growth.

Book talks about two different kind of mindsets; the fixed mindset, which means believing that talent is given and born, and the growth mindset, believing that people can always learn to be better on everything. Book goes through examples and science behind it from many different views. It looks sports, business and arts. It introduces many good examples of people who are in growth mindset and some who are in fixed mindset.

Book goes through how this mindset difference affects on people's behavior in different challenges and daily routines. It also introduces reasons why people has grown in to either fixed or growth mindset.

Book has its own section for parents, coaches and teachers. I see parents to be most important ones. They can accidentally grow their children easily to fixed mindset with having good intentions to grow to be successful and open for learning. Giving credit for good grades for example can turn against the child, so that they are not taking challenges anymore in the future, since they become afraid of not being good at something. I actually believe this to be true, many of the people who got the best grades at school, haven't taken the challenge anymore at the work life.

I highly recommend this book to everyone who has kids, is a teacher or is a coach. There is lot of proof that genes don't mean everything and everyone really can learn. Also important is to understand that for learners, willingness to learn is more important than the immediate results and grades.

I really liked the book. It was entertaining with many good examples. I've read couple of books about the same subject from different perspectives , so the area starts to be familiar to me. Still I found some good new information from this book. It was entertaining.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Giving an online training - thoughts on it's challenges

I'm not a full time trainer, but I've been keeping some trainings in different places. Recently I had to give my first training totally online, so that it was only me and my computer using screen sharing with participants. That training was the hardest I've kept so far. There's so many challenges with online trainings which I wasn't aware of. Here's my learning's:

Whole situation seemed really strange. I knew some of the guys online, but there was about half of them I didn't know. It felt absurd to talk alone in my room and try to get people to learn something. For me, it's so much easier to go in front of the crowd and adjust and collaborate with the crowd to get the message through. And by no means it's really easy for me to go in front of the crowd, but it's just so much harder to do it totally online without true connection to the people.

With online training there's almost no connection to the people you are talking to. You don't see their reactions, you can't read from gestures or body languages that are the guys understanding you or would they need some more explanation. Or in the worst case they might be totally bored and they would need something to wake them up.

Also with online communication,  people tend to mute their microphones and you don't even here the slightest sound of laughter, when you try to be funny or you don't hear the moment of silence when they are possibly processing about something controversial or surprising you said. It's just you, your slides and silence. It's truly scary.

You are left with your voice and slides. You can't use your body language and the space to move around, you normally have in face to face trainings. You have to try to use just your voice to get the message trough. It is really hard. I've worked whole my career with multicontinent projects and I'm really used for using online tools and telco's for communication. I still never would have guessed how hard keeping training with these tools is. All the credit for those guys who do this more regularly.

I want to highlight that keeping training is so much different than meetings and presentations via online tools. In meetings and presentations the topic is often better known, there's natural conversation, microphones are open much more and you can hear and feel more about what others are doing. So I'm only talking about the difficulty of online trainings, the other stuff is much easier.

With the experience of two online trainings I'm not a good expert to give any tips how to perform better in those, but here's what I will do differently next time:

• Setting the stage. I will try to get much more people to say something in very beginning. I'll try to get some expectations and knowledge about their competence in the area in question out before I start. That may help collaboration further during training.
• I'm going to change my slides to contain less information. Even with face to face trainings, people tend to be reading the slides when you are talking to them, I can just guess how much they are concentrating on slides when that's all they see. Maybe less data in the slides will help the people to focus on listening. This is just me guessing, but it's worth of trying still.
• I might be looking if there would be some way to get feedback during the training. Maybe vote buttons or some red, yellow, green lights for the users to be able to say when they've heard enough about subject or would like some more explanation. Even it might feel artificial, it could still give important feedback to me, to decide how to progress.

I guess it's obvious that I prefer face to face trainings and I guess everyone else does also. Sometimes still the subject is such small and focused that it's much more convenient to try to keep online training in 1-2 hours, than use many days or weeks to travel to keep face to face training. So I bet it wasn't my last training online.

I always like to try new stuff and learn new skills. This event was actually quite useful learning for me. I learned a lot about the teaching. I noticed many useful things when I was missing some important ways to communicate. From now I'm much more aware on those and I will try to concentrate on using those more wisely when I have the change.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen