Thursday, 09 September 2010
Training Needs Analysis
Wednesday, 02 August 2006 00:00

All education should be designed with some basic principles in mind. The one overall guiding principle should be based on how we take a student from where he is before the course begins to where we want him to be at the end of the course? We will need to create a set of prerequisites or course entry requirements to agree a start point and a set of training objectives to agree what skills and knowledge the student should have at the end of the course. This exercise is usually part of a Training Needs Analysis (TNA) to define course requirements.

Without clear entry requirements and objectives it is very difficult to design a good training course which will meet delegate requirements, because we don't know what those requirements are. Even if the training is being designed for a general training catalogue and not a specific customer this exercise will have to occur. We will however need to take a look at industry requirements and standards.

 

The Start Point
The first part of a TNA is to assess the starting point of the delegates who will be taking the training. Do they understand the required generic technology elements? Do they have industry experience so they understand the environment into which the product they are learning will be placed? Have they worked on similar products so they will only need to learn the product specifics? Are all delegates at the same level?

Once we understand the delegates starting point we can set entry requirements to ensure all delegates who attend the training have similar levels of knowledge. While this can be hard to achieve it is necessary to ensure that we don't end up with students of widely differing capabilities on the same course as this will reduce the benefits and experience of all delegates on the course.

The results of this exercise should allow us to build a picture of the initial requirements, whether we need to offer some basic technology training before the product training for some of the potential delegates or even a more basic product training course. Once we understand the requirements we can start to build a training programme. We will know what prerequisite training will need to be specified and for each course what skills and knowledge the delegate should have before attending the course.

The Objectives
The objectives of a training course are to meet customer's requirements and to keep them happy!

To understand the specific objectives of the training course we will need to look at the job role of the delegates and the tasks that a particular job entails. The objectives of the course should cover the requirements of the delegate and should not be designed around what the product is capable of doing. It is acceptable to promote the features of a product so delegates can understand its capabilities, but there is no use designing a course around features which will never be used by the majority of delegates. These elements should be put into separate courses which can be taken by students who have a particular interest in that topic.

Depth of content is always an issue, are we training people to the right depth to operate and maintain our products effectively. The guiding principle for the depth of content should be whether delegates have covered the theory and practise of typical tasks for their job role to the point where they understand it and can operate independently. Where possible practical experience should be given as close to their job role as possible.

Tiered certification programmes should also be approached in this manner, in other words does each tier of certification match the job role requirements of sufficient delegates to make the training worthwhile.

Summary

Ascertaining Entry Requirements:

  • What level of generic technology knowledge?
  • What level of industry experience?
  • What level of product experience?
  • Are all delegates at the same level?
  • What can be done to equalise the entry level of delegates?

Understanding Objectives

  • What are the job roles of delegates
  • What are the tasks performed by each job role
  • What training is possible to give to the student understanding and experience for these tasks
 
Education Flow
Wednesday, 02 August 2006 00:00

Once we understand the objectives of a training course we can start to design a course with a logical flow from start to finish. This is often called the "Education Flow". To achieve a good education flow analyse what basic steps are required to take the delegate from start to finish. A decision will need to be as to which order those steps should occur to logically take the student through the subject matter in simple incremental steps. Information should be delivered in incremental steps to build in stages on the knowledge gained in previous sections. An example of this for a level 2 engineer product course would be as follows:

1. Generic Technology Theory Training Courses - Where appropriate training should be given on the generic technology on which the product is based. This should be targeted to cover all required elements of the technology needed for the following product training. Depending on the product line some customers are reluctant to send their personnel on this type of course as they think they already have the knowledge required, this however is not always the case. The generic technology elements which occur later in the training will act as a reminder of the key principles specific to the topic or configuration they are working on at that stage of the course.

2. Product and Technology Positioning - This should show the student how the product fits into the telecoms world. It should position products, protocols, services and technologies to enable the student to see how these fit together. This approach allows the student to understand the bigger picture so when troubleshooting or configuring a product they can identify other products with which they may be interacting and the type of interactions that will occur.

3. Hardware Description - A description of the physical elements of the product and its capabilities.

4. Basic Product Configuration - This should get the product up and running and get it to the point where services can be configured. This may include configuration file management, CLI or NMS connectivity and basic IP addressing.

5. Specific Generic Technology Theory. - The elements of generic technology theory that relate to the specific product or topic should be taught. This does not necessarily require the teaching of a complete course on each technology as long as the student understands the general overview of the topic and the specifics which relate to the product or topic being taught. This acts as a reminder for people who have taken the generic technology training and should relate directly to the product specifics they are currently working on.

6. Vendor Specific Technology Theory - All products include some proprietary technologies or vendor specific implementation of a standard which needs to be understood to enable a student to perform configuration and troubleshooting.

7. Configuration Principles - These are not configuration steps but configuration principles i.e. an understanding of the theory behind the configuration.

8. The configuration commands and steps

9. Configuration lab exercises

10. Troubleshooting

Note: steps 4 - 9 may be repeated many times during the course, perhaps once for each topic.

If students have a good understanding of the theory on which the product is designed then fault finding is a logical extension of their understanding of the product and protocols on which it is based. If all a student has is a recipe book of scripts to use they will not be capable of creating new configurations for themselves or even understanding what is happening when things start to go wrong.