Desktop training: getting the right mix

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May 1, 1991 by Howard Cohen, Steven Moonitz

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him water-ski. That's how we sometimes describe the training issues associated with a transition to desktop publishing.

After making multi-thousand-dollar commitments to desktop publishing hardware and software, some publishers are failing to carry that investment to their people-those on the front lines who are working with the hardware and programs every day. Publishers who take a short cut and don't budget for or implement training are destined to discover, a year later, that their desktop publishing system is not all that was promised.

It's not uncommon for consultants, brought in by desperate managers, to find "fully trained" artists and designers who can't set a Tab or establish a Style Sheet in QuarkXpress. Revealing to experienced editors the Word Count or Spell Check functions in Microsoft Word sometimes produces profound awe, despite the fact that the instructions for these features are simply illustrated in the manual and plainly obvious onscreen.

State-of-the-art hardware and top software packages are simply tools that facilitate typesetting and pagination. But the finest-laid desktop publishing plans can be riddled with problems, delays and frustration if your artists, designers, production personnel and editors are not properly trained.

When making a training decision, you'll first need to establish a few ground rules.

Will your training be held on site, off site or a combination of both? Will the training be generic or specific? Will it be handled by professional trainers, consultants or experienced staffers? How long will you need to budget for training? Who on your staff needs what kind of training? How long will it take before your staff is up and running?

Off-site training

Off-site training programs, usually at a computer center or vendor workshop (at $250 to $350 per person per day), have evolved and improved over the past two years. Originally, they were set up as generic overview sessions. But while "Intro to Mac" is best learned in a basic overview class, more complex applications, such as QuarkXpress or Adobe illustrator, can be extremely difficult to grasp unless the student can translate the skills learned to his own work responsibilities.

Recently, schools and vendor facilities have been making a stronger effort to customize their training to their students. This means that if your publication is a tabloid newsmagazine, your staff shouldn't have to endure seven hours of newsletter design and production.

if your staff doesn't fill a whole classroom, however, the instructor will try to accommodate the interests of the varied student body, and the amount of time your people receive to learn your specific application will be less. Chris Kronish technology manager of New York-based Entertainment weekly, heads up the desktop publishing program that employs 10 designers and eight associate editors, one in charge of each major section of the magazine. She advocates sending her new designers to a two-day QuarkXpress class and a two-day Adobe Illustrator session at a New York DTP training center called WheelerHawkins. The "Intro to Mac" course is taught by Businessland, a general computer vendor and trainer.

But not all vendors have the best equipment for DTP, because that discipline is just one that vendors service. When Businessland tried to teach layout on 9-inch monochrome screens, Kronish switched to a trainer that specialized in DTP and had the best equipment for it.

"I was pleased with the classroom training the staff received, " says Kronish, whose training requirements were large enough to have full classes devoted solely to her staffers. "Once they have the basics, however, we bring in a personal trainer to fine-tune their skills at the magazine."

Taking it all in-house

The classroom doesn't work for everyone. Karen Meneghin, director of editorial operations for New York-based Sports Illustrated for Kids, began giving her staff an introduction to QuarkXpress, Adobe Illustrator and other design packages about a year ago. "But the two-day classes were not customized. We were very frustrated because they were not in-depth enough on the subject areas that we were planning to use. " in-house trainers were more in line with her needs.

In general, on-site training tends to be more expensive (say $400 a day and up), but also more effective because it's often one-on-one and skills are best learned when staffers are working on live projects, on their own machines, and in familiar surroundings. Questions can be answered and problems solved on the spot.

Meneghin opted to bring in a trainer four days a week for eight consecutive weeks. The trainer was commissioned to construct the magazine's templates, and then train the three designers and three production people to use those templates.

Each staffer would meet with the trainer one half-day each week. we felt that the two-full-day blitz of training that is offered in the training schools is just not effective," Meneghin says. "It's much better to have some breathing room between sessions so the staffers can work on what they've learned. Also, longer training periods would have been difficult to schedule and would have caused disruptions in the production schedule."