Networking tips

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One of my personal goals is to improve my networking skills. Here are some networking tips, based on my own experience.

Networking tips

• Create personal networking cards to hand out. Even if you already have a job. The idea is that you are able to give our your personal contact info vs. your work email and telephone number and not limit yourself to your current profession, especially if you are looking to branch out and do something new and different. Vistaprint will give you 250 free business cards. Information to put on your personal card: name, a tagline (a quick description of what you do or what you want to do), email address, website and telephone number. I would suggest leaving off your mailing address, for the purpose of privacy and security.
• Be friendly and make friends with people because you want to get to know them, not because you want to sell them something, or need something from them. I'm not a fan of people who chat with me just to give me a sales pitch. I can usually smell them from a mile away and avoid them at all costs. On the other hand, I've built great relationships with friends I've met at organizations and will then help them out later on, or listen to what they want to tell me. Once credibility and a friendship has been established, I'll become a loyal part of their professional network. It's about building a relationship.
• Keep up-to-date about current events, so you have something to talk about. If you run out of topics, ask them questions about what they do, where they live, the company they work for. People love to talk about themself!
• Remember to follow-up! Send your new contact an email, or better yet, give them a call. Set up time to meet over coffee, or for lunch. Use this opportunity to get to know them better and remember to thank them for taking the time to connect with you. Don't forget to stay connected with your new contact. Add them on LinkedIn and periodically send them an email to stay in touch. That way, if you need their help one day, you won't just be going to them in times of need.

Places to network

Trying to figure out where to meet new people? Try these locations:

• Professional organizations- some organizations exist with the sole purpose of offering networking opportunities. Instead of avoiding them, try to embrace them.
• At the company where you work- get to know someone in your department. Or someone outside your department. You might find that you have a lot in common and can help each other out by collaborating on projects.
• Community groups- join your city's Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, Lion's Club, Young Professionals club or Toastmasters. This is a great way to meet other professionals living and working in your community, especially with others outside of the learning and development world.
• Via friends-of-friends/acquaintances- next time you're at a social gathering, strike up a conversation with someone that you've never met before. (They won't even know you're trying to network with them!)

How to become a trainer

This post consists of two parts. Part I is the story of how I became a trainer and Part II is about how you can pursue a career in training. A few times a year, I get asked by co-workers and friends who are in various roles about how they can become a trainer. This is the answer I usually give them.

Part I- How I got my job

After completing graduate school, I was in search for a job. The year was 2004 and I didn't have a ton of work experience to lean on. A friend of mine referred me to a training position at a new call center and with that personal recommendation, the hiring manager took a leap of faith and brought me on as a new trainer. Within a year, the company grew and I was promoted to Manager of Technical Training. Yipee! Unfortunately, shortly after, the call center ended up laying off most of its employees. Luckily, my job was spared, thanks to my director (the one who had hired me). But after seeing the light, my husband and I decided to make our move back to the Twin Cities. I applied for a training job in the tech support department of a healthcare company. With another friend's personal recommendation, I was hired! But at that job, I missed working as part of a larger training team, so after about a year, I applied for a training position at a health insurance company. I went through a couple rounds of interviews, auditioned and was offered the job where I still work, almost 5 years later.

Part II- How you can become a trainer

Join a professional networking organization
If you are in the Twin Cities, below are three organizations to consider joining. Attend the monthly meetings, meet and network with other professional trainers, instructional designers and e-learning developers.

PACT- The Professional Association for Computer Training is a local training organization that's been around for over 40 years. Monthly networking and speaker meetings are included in the $165 annual membership fee. Recent featured speakers include Tom Kuhlmann, from Articulate, Elliot Masie and Josh Cavalier, otherwise known as Captain Captivate.

ASTD-TCC- The American Society for Training and Development- Twin Cities Chapter is part of a larger national professional organization. ASTD-TCC hosts an annual regional conference every November in St. Paul, MN, along with monthly speaker meetings. First year memberships cost $130 per year, with $110 as a renewal rate. Monthly meetings cost $30 to attend (lunch is included). Recently featured speakers include Lou Russell and Bob Mosher.

ISPI- The International Society for Performance Improvement offers monthly meetings and presents on topics relating to training and learning theories. Meetings are included in the $50 annual membership fee.

Incorporate training into your current job
If you're currently working another job, think of ways that you can incorporate training or coaching into what you already do. Talk to your leadership about ways that you can help your department with learning and development. Create job aids. Document your knowledge and pass it on. Then add these skills to your resume. You don't need to be a trainer to train.

Volunteer or sign up to train a community education class
Google search "the name of your city" & "community ed" and see what classes your local community ed already offers. Think of something you're particiularly skilled at and offer to teach a class about it. Most community ed departments are always looking for new teachers and new topics to offer to their residents. If this works, you're now officially a paid trainer and can add this to your resume. It's a win-win for everyone!

Another option is to check out your local library to see if they need any volunteers in their training department. This is a nice way to give back to your community and pick up some facilitation skills.

Learn the training lingo
Get a subsciption to Training magazine, T+D magazine or CLO magazine. If you are on LinkedIn, Twitter or any other social networking websites, "follow" learning and development professionals. Read the articles, read their posts. Absorb all of the lingo from the training and development world. Learn about techniques, trends and systems. This will come in handy when you land your first trainer interview.

Impress during your interview and audition
Spend quality time preparing and practicing before your interview and audition. Ask other trainers for advice. Practice in front of your family. Don't read from your PowerPoint slides. Give candy out as treats :) Feel comfortable and confident with your training material before you walk through the door. If you can, bring a portfolio of training you've created, even if the interviewer doesn't ask for one, it's always nice to have something handy to show them. Keep searching for open positions, applying for them and networking. If you were meant to be a trainer, it will happen for you. Good luck!

PS. Tom Kuhlmann just published a great post about how to get an E-Learning job: http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/get-an-e-learning-job-with-these-simple-tips/

Captain Captivate

Welcome to my very first live-blogging event! Josh Cavalier, CEO of Lodestone Digital aka Captain Captivate is presenting to a group of PACT members at the Brooklyn Center library. His blog can be found at http://www.captaincaptivate.com/. My colleague GM (with the pelt) is also live-blogging this event: http://unusualphrases.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/live-blogging-captain-captivate-training-session/

 

Gary's Pelt

These are my notes from today's session. Most of the knowledge and thoughts come from Josh Cavalier, but the witty comments belong to me :)

Mobile Learning
It's the next big thing. With Amazon.com's Kindle Fire tablet selling for $200, Josh expects that just like with cell phones, everyone will have a tablet. The issue with iPads and other Apple devices not being able to support Flash? Adobe is working on that. Josh thinks that Flash is not dead and is not going away anytime soon.

Now for some Captivate-specific notes:

• Don't know which size to use for your new Captivate project? Going with 790 x 545 is a safe bet.
• Captivate uses a slide-based metaphor. "Captivate users coming over from PowerPoint think "Hey! This is just like PowerPoint" and then start using it and think "Hey! This is nothing like PowerPoint."" Nicely said!
• Everything is time-based. You have to understand the timeline. Some timelines are very long, some timelines are very complex.As your e-learning gets published, it's one giant timeline.
• Use the tool bar on your left. The menu on your right changes depending on what you're working on. You can collapse the menus. Shadows are fancy (that's just my opinion).

Now, moving on to the content:

• Have a style guide. Josh gave us a style guide! Done and done. I'm excited to have something to follow.
• Create a storyboard. We were shown an effective storyboard created in Word. The storyboard includes details, text, audio, what the user is required to do and the results.
• Use a template, it'll save you lots of time. Makes everything look professional and consistent. Placeholders let you convert the little grey boxes into text, animation, images and more. The animations are already built in, you just have to fill in the text. Genius.
• Always save your work!

File extensions
.cptx = Captivate file
.cptl = Template file

Template sizes

• Soft skills: 790 x 545
• System training: Be very mindful of the size you're using. Create a prototype and test it to make sure that it fits the browser, so your users don't have to scroll around to see everything.

Template creation

• Master slide- to set up your logo, watermark-- stuff that will be on every slide.
• Skin Editor- lets you set navigation of the course. Playback, borders and the table of contents feature can be found here. Wish I would have known about this 5 years ago.
• New slide- uses the master template vs. blank slide- literally a blank slide.
• Playback head- it's our friend. It's running to the end line. The role of the playback head is to draw everything at that moment in time.
• Insert, Standard Objects --> Click Box, Button, Text Entry Box = only three objects that will stop the playback head.
• Josh uses "disabled" buttons to prevent users from click-click-clicking through the e-learning.
• Creating e-learning for tablets? Your buttons need to be just buttons, without any fancy-hover-over-changing-color-business.
• Buttons need to be copy and pasted into each individual slide. They cannot be part of the master slide. You can "lock" the buttons after pasting, but they need to be "unlocked" before copying.
• Placeholders can be used for text, images, animation and more.
• By creating a regular text box, customizing the preferences to your liking and then deleting it, a placeholder will appear in it's place.

Handy tips

• Control-0 (zero) makes your slide Fit-to-Screen. Or Command-0 (zero), if you're a Mac user. Control-1, Control-2, Control-3 to zoom into the screen.
• Control-Enter is the shortcut to Preview.
• Edit, Preferences, Defaults, uncheck the two "Autosize" features. This will prevent your text boxes from autosizing themselves.
• Window, Branching View lets you view the entire e-learning and all of the different branches.
• Group your slides to make orgainzation a little easier.

Interesting fact: The original Captivate was called Flash Cam and it would take a snapshot and put an animated cursor on top to make it look like an animation/screen simulation.

$$userVariables$$

• Name the variable in "camelCase".
• If you select Properties, Insert, Variables gets your variable into your text boxes. Way to call people by their $$firstName$$.

Branching

• Created my very first branching scenario! Woohoo! This is going to open up a whole new world of e-learning creation for me.
• Advanced Actions make me feel like a faux-computer programmer.
• "You gotta name it, to claim it."

Flash animation
These are good places to find Flash animation to purchase. Before buying any Flash animation, make sure it's programmed for Action Script 3 (AS3).

• http://activeden.net/ 
• http://www.flashkit.com/
• http://www.istockphoto.com/
• http://elearningbrothers.com/
• Cool drag & drop widget: http://www.infosemantics.com.au/dragdrop

Widgets
Parameters box that allow you to change properties about the widget.

Videos
Can be inserted as:

• object (FLV or F4V)- if you don't need anything else displayed on the slide
• slide video- so you can add additional content like adding closed captioning when the video plays.

Video, Edit Video Timing will let you control the split timing on the video and what information you want the user to see at the appropriate time.

Conclusion
Wow! What a fantastic and worthwhile session. I'm excited to try out my new Captivate skills. I can already think of a couple of projects I'd like to tackle. My main goal for my next e-learning is to use branching scenarios. Oh, and to storyboard it before I start.

Learning 2011

In less than a month, I'll be headed off to Learning 2011. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to attend Elliot Masie's presentation at PACT, a local training and development networking organization I belong to. During his speech, he spoke about the 30 Under 30 program and after returning back to the office, I was inspired to apply. Since this is my last year of being in the "Under 30" category, I was very excited when about a month later, I received an email from Elliot letting me know that I was accepted into the program.

10 reasons why I'm excited for Learning 2011:

10) Meeting the other 29 Under 30'ers.
9) Attending sessions to learn about training at companies like Google, Starbucks, Facebook and more.
8) Helping to facilitate and lead sessions.
7) Reverse mentoring.
6) Former President Bill Clinton is a keynote speaker.
5) John Lithgow (Trinity killer from Dexter) is another keynote speaker.
4) Watching the best of the best from the learning industry live in action.
3) Getting e-published along with my other Under 30 peers. (Still need to complete my writing assignment!)
2) Networking opportunities with fellow trainers and developers.
1) A work conference at Disney World!

A link to the Event Guide: http://www.learning2011.com/images/stories/L11EventGuidePREVIEW.pdf

What draws me to certain blogs

I follow a handful of blogs. Mostly stuff I'm interested in personally and a few related to work. There are three core points that make me a repeat visitor to these websites:

1. Fabulous photography.
Tantalising food photography is the main draw. Blogs like http://www.bakerella.com/ and http://thepioneerwoman.com/ make me want to be a better housewife. (Being a little snarky here). I enjoy looking at beautiful pictures and learning how these bloggers photograph their subjects. Even if I don't really care about what the topic of the day is, I'll go to check out the new pictures.

2. Witty/helpful commentary.
It's not really a blog, per se, but http://theoatmeal.com/ is so witty, it makes me laugh out loud. Not LOL, but actually Laugh. Out. Loud. Another one of my favorite blogs is http://www.babycheapskate.com/. Besides helping me to save money on baby and kid-related purchases, I appreciate the blog's helpful cheat sheets on the price per diaper to beat. Now that's info I can really use.

3. Attractive site design.
I admit that a pretty website will make me return. If it looks like a Geocities page from 1990, I'll probably never come back. Nice graphics and easy-to-understand navigation are two key features I appreciate. Articulate's Tom Kuhlmann's Rapid eLearning blog http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/ fits this definition.The graphics are entertaining, the topics are timely and relate closely to the work that I do and the blog isn't too cluttered with uncessary features or annoying ads.