Leave it to the pros...seriously.

I apologize, once again, for my spotty (at best) attendance on this wonderful platform. Things are, shall we say, crazy with work and personal (we're expecting #2...due date Christmas Eve), but I'll try to stay focused on the work-based, as there's a lesson that I already knew, but is being learned by many. And it all starts with a simple analogy:

Take your favorite car that you own, give the keys to someone who's never driven before, and tell them to travel from point A to point B. Without my saying anything further, what would you expect to happen? Simple, right? CRASH, BOOM, BANG...repeat as necessary. If someone doesn't know the inherent workings of something (they know that cars transport people, beyond that...), how can you possibly expect them to take good care and be a safe 'driver'.

Some of you in the industry are probably putting it together...maybe some aren't. I'll speak in vague terms, so as not to draw professional flak, nor to be unprofessional (I'm going for caustic, not 'cost-you-your-job'-ic). Let's say a certain training organization has handled a regulary scheduled yearly influx of new staff members. And LET'S JUST SAY this training/onboarding was 1 day and that these new starts were coming from different 'departments'. LET'S JUST SAY this group has brought these folks on board for four years going, and everything was working well enough.

Enter your people in the respective departments who now say "We want to train these new starts. We want to do it our way, with our spin on things, but you (the training team in question) need to do it all for us." So, these departments design what they think is solid training and what they THINK is education, only to have the original training team be forced to be the messenger - to carry out this ill-thought, ill-prepared agenda. And now, instead of one day of the training team being devoted to training, they are pulled from their regularly scheduled duties for more than TWO WEEKS to work with each 'client', if you will.

Those of you quick on the calculators can probably figure, pretty quickly at that, the increase of 'cost' when you go from one 8-hour day to eleven of them. Those of you that develop and deliver training KNOW what happens when an over-eager SME tries to yank control on a project/module/etc. And those of you who have ever done classroom training know that it's a much more attainable task to teach to the middle line, specializing instruction afterwards, then it is to as you go along.

This HYPOTHETICAL situation I'm sure/I know is all too common in the industry, and it happens when you've worked with a group long enough that they begin to get that glazed look in their eye that equals "Training sure looks easy...I bet I could do it". It's only when they try to that they realize CBT doesn't just randomly generate from a computer program, lessons take time to plan (and that's from ME...king of rapid proto), and training takes panache, if I may be so bold. It takes a trainer to train.

Bottom line, kids - Leave it to the experts. We get it done more quickly, more efficiently, and more cost-effectively. Stick to your areas of expertise, we'll stick to ours.