Bang the IT training drum: The founder of the International Association of IT trainers sounds off about his industry - Column

T+D, June, 2002 by Dave Murphy, Eva Kaplan-Leiserson

I'm an IT trainer, an information technology trainer, and I think that my colleagues and I need to understand our key role in developing employee talent. It's not to encourage people just to like technology or learn to use it. Our responsibility--our goal--is to help them use technology tools to increase their productivity and their value to their employers.

How did I come to be passionate about IT training? In the early 1980s, I took a graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins University on how to write a novel. We wrote 20 pages of fiction a week and worked through five revisions. I typed away on an electric typewriter, swearing because my housemate and I were too cheap to turn on the air conditioning.

My dad worked at an IBM plant in Florida. I called him and asked, "What's this thing called a PC?" Soon, a PC-a double-floppy portable (which my dad bought with his employee plan)--arrived at my doorstep. He'd also bought me a color monitor and dot-matrix printer.

Shopping for software, I finally settled on an early version of WordPerfect. It was like magic: I could write and edit on the screen, and I could print a clean draft at any time. I proofread on paper, then went back to the computer to make my changes, and printed my finished paper. My peers, still using typewriters, labored six nights a week. I knocked out the assignments in a couple of nights.

I thought to myself, This is what I want to do. I want to teach people how to use this box, this computer. From that day on, I knew I would become a computer trainer.

I still have that passion for efficiency. That's why I think of the computer as my tool. Once you've learned to use a tool well, you understand its value.

Learning starts at the office

Having the right tools and right skills makes people more willing to do a job. Just as the right hammer can inspire home repair, learning to use new software and hardware can inspire workers, improve performance, and reduce costs.

Take my co-worker Susan (name changed), our office administrator. When she started with us in the 1990s, she could type well but didn't know how to use a computer. So, we had Susan rake our level one and level two classes. She learned Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint.

We gave Susan all kinds of projects. For example, she used Access to create a fax list that tied .into our registration system. The morning after a class, Susan faxes every participant a thank-you letter that contains a course-specific postscript inviting him or her to take the next class. It's not just a thank-you letter; it's targeted marketing, made possible by Susan's skill in using Access.

Another example of innovative use of a learned tech skill involves a cartoon character called Dolly Damar, named after one of my companies, Damar Group Ltd. Dolly started appearing in our faxed newsletters. I wondered, 'Who the heck is Dolly Damar? I asked around and found out that a co-worker, Janet (name changed), had created the Dolly character. She sat through a PowerPoint class and then thought of a business activity to use the skills she'd learned.

What's the dollar value of workers being able to run the components of Office together seamlessly or create a marketing image using PowerPoint? I can't state an exact figure. But if I had to measure, if I had to say how Susan and Janet increased company sales, I'd say they probably added US$25,000 to $50,000 over a four- to five- year period.

I'm constantly encouraging trainers to look at how technology gets used in business and the effect that an IT instructor can have on an overall business process. But a lot of IT trainers just want to improve a specific skill. They have an immediate problem they want to solve, and here I am talking about the big picture. That's OK. I'm going to keep banging my drum. If you want to, you can follow me.

Join the parade

When I teach MS Office, I like to wrap up about 15 to 20 minutes early and then say, "Before I release you for the day, let me show you how to mail merge from Access to Word." Participants often respond, "Why don't we just merge from a Word document to another Word document, like from a table into a form letter?" That's when I open a practice database that contains tens of thousands of names and merge it with the Word file in about two minutes. I say, "Do you think that would ever work from a Word document to a Word document?" Then people get my point.

I don't want learners to memorize in 15 minutes all of the steps of that process. I want them to know that the capability is there, and I want to pique their interest so that they try to learn on their own--or at least call up the trainer a week later and say, "Murph showed me this in class. Can I schedule a time with you to learn exactly how to do that?" I want people to get excited about technology, not because technology is great in and of itself, but because employees who are excited about using technology will use it in innovative ways to the benefit of their entire organizations.