29-minutes to Easy Street

Two-hours is better, but that's still Too Big

I was Bentley's Civil Training Content Lead when we transformed our training from the "Multi-day Instructor-led" model to the "Modular self-training" model.  "It's not about how we want to teach.  It's about how they want to learn."

Two-hour blocks was a giant leap forward then, but it's too big an ask nowadays.  That's not how they want or are able to learn (due to time and budget constraints).

It's time for the Next Leap Forward:  Billable (micro)learning.

Let's make the goal measurable: 29-minutes from need to mastery. 

If you spend less than half-an-hour making the remaining 7.5 hours of your day dramatically more productive, that should be billable, yes?  We often spend more than 30 minutes reviewing client standards and specifications - and billing for that.

29-minutes or less solves the two major roadblocks to training:  availability and cost.

To be clear, your total learning time won't be reduced by orders of magnitude.  There is a lot of fat and bloat that can be trimmed off, reducing training total training time by maybe 30%.  But learning just what you need just when you need it is better learning: direct application solves the need immediately - no need to have to retain the lesson for months.  In Training Industry Best Practice lingo:  "Just Enough, Just In Time."

Note: "Microlearning" is actually a better term: "micro" implies a constraint.  "Just Enough" is an optimization goal for which it is too easy to say "three days is 'Just Enough.'"  Microlearning compels thinking "as short as possible".

There's work involved...

The content needs to be parsed down from the 2-hour default.  There is some work required here.  

Bentley designed a lot of their training to fill a two-hour block.  Why? To fill a conference workshop session and make in-person training agendas easier to bundle. That constraint of scheduling convenience overrode the "Just Enough" training industry paradigm.

Better Training Practices

Beyond the "Two Hour" block, there are some other training design suboptimizations and inconsistencies.  If you're going to atomize the existing content for easier consumability, be aware of the opportunities:

• OpenRoads training is not consistently "sub-scoped".  Exercise 3 typically requires you to work through Exercise 1 and 2.
  • Setting up "Exercise Datasets" (or "Jumpaheads") are the quickest way to atomize the multi-hour courses into smaller chunks.
• Courses often start "from scratch," with Exercise 1 often creating new files from seed and attaching references. 
  • Basically, the first ten minutes of a course is overhead for something you already know how to do
    • Ironically they don't have a standalone short course on best practices on how to set up a project 
• the target audience is almost always a single monolith: designers, with little consideration for consumers
  • there are more consumers than designers and 100% of the "consumer skills" are valuable for designers
    • a little data cleanup opens up the content to a much broader audience
    • a good portion of those consumer "evaluation skills" are critical in ensuring the accuracy of in-process design.
• Sometimes the "shiny new tool" is emphasized over more fundamental tools.  More of a marketing/sales intent than good training design.
• "Training Design" is often simply linear "Process Documentation" for a single learner role - the process an experienced sole designer would take on a typical project - it's not "designed" training.
  • The most egregious example of this was "Generating Reports" was deferred to Chapter 10 of 13, because reports are required as deliverables after the design is complete.  A manager wanting to learn to generate a report would have to sit through eight chapters of content they will never use.
• "Single Pass" training mentality (related to "Documenting the Guru's Workflow" habit).
  
  • My favorite examples are with Laying Out Drainage Structures: there are over a dozen things that have to go right in placing an inlet.  The last thing you want to do is throw in all the bells and whistles (like Civil AccuDraw) and have any expectation that any of the students will nail it.  If you do not immediately provide troubleshooting instructions, you will have derailed 99% of self-learners.  
  • Have multiple passes for very complicated workflows.  Iterated "Incremented complexity" boosts self-learning success   
    • Best practice is to start with a sandbox.  Give the learner space to play around, troubleshoot and iterate.
    • The good news is that "sandbox examples" are very easy to add.

Actions 

Catalog your target content.  You can feed the course PDFs into AI to get an idea of which Exercises are "Ready to Train" and which are continuations of previous chapters (no "Start Here" dataset).

Build Exercise Starter Datasets.  Someone will have to work through the courses, saving milestones.  "Beginners" can work through this and save the files.  This can be crowdsourced.

Fix the low-hanging Inconsistencies and Slop.  This is where experience in the software and training design matters.  Sometimes something is made unnecessarily complex, or a new tool is a better solution.  Sometimes the payoff isn't worth the time investment.  Sometimes there is some time-consuming, completely out-of-scope workflows thrown in for no justifiable reason.  Sometimes a lot of time can be saved with a little cleanup.

Get the content to the learners (see below). 

There's a (centralized) Consequence... 

You always need to manage your content (Curation - the Overlooked Enabler).  As your content gets more granular, there's more to manage.  More granular means more specialized, meaning more varied target audiences.  More to manage, more to curate. 

The curation investment return is at-scale benefit to your production/billable staff.  

 Making the smaller training chunks findable (pull) and assignable (push) requires a robust LMS

• You need a successful "Pull" LMS, where learners can find the most appropriate content quickly.
  • You can see that current repositories/servers bury you with noise to flex their "quantity".  
• More content forces the need for better content management
• Well-tagged data still needs to work with the interface. "AI agents" still lack the expertise between the training audience roles and most appropriate content.
• More courses means more learning paths to recommend and track - that's an additional LMS challenge and Curator challenge.

Don't Forget Force

To ensure compliance, you absolutely need a assignment and tracking system.  The ability to force compliance.  Consider your HR-mandated training:  0% interest, 100% compliance.

Training: Use Force

We talk a bit about LMSs in Curation - the Overlooked Enabler