In this edition of the Designing Engineer newsletter, we pick back up with Part II of our discussion on software training.  In the last issue, as you may recall, we laid some ground work to determine just how we evaluate the importance of a program to our company.  If you’d like, you can review Part One by going to www.dasi-solutions.com/newsletter.

In this issue I’d like to help you learn …actually how you learn!  When outlining this topic and thinking about how to describe the methods we use to learn new skills, I recalled a time in my younger days when I had started two new sports; skiing and racquetball. 

At the time I wasn’t really “thinking” about how I learned a new skill; I was just out there “doing it”.  Like Nike told us we should all be!  Over the years I discovered there are three primary methods people use to learn new skills; Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic.  More on these subjects and how you should factor them in to your decision process later.  Reflecting back on those times, I realized that I had learned each activity using these different methods and ended up getting much different results.  The reason?  I had different goals for each sport, as we discussed last issue.  Also, I didn’t really apply my best learning method for each sport!

The history lesson continues…

It was also during that same time that I was learning to apply CAD to my career as a Designer.  These were the early days of CAD and there wasn’t a lot of training resources available.  I had read the software manuals, tutorials were pretty much a thing of the future; I researched and sought out trade magazines.  Resellers weren’t really offering training, as they were just starting to learn these new programs them selves!  It wasn’t until about a year had gone by that the local community college started to offer training courses.

So given my situation, I had to get creative and do it quickly.  The parallels between my sporting and CAD experiences started off very similar to one another.  My first tendency was to follow a similar path.  And I would have, with the exception of perhaps one major difference…  I knew from the beginning that Computer-Aided-Design was a major investment for our company, and that I needed good resources!  This was my career, not a game.  I couldn’t afford to “Just do it!”  The stakes and goals were a lot higher.  I needed to gain experience and training from reliable and experienced sources right from the start.  However, the problem was at that beginning, as I mentioned earlier, they didn’t exist! 

Moving forward…

That was a thumbnail summary of my experiences learning CAD.  Today’s resources are a LOT different than back in the “early” days of CAD.  But is the process of learning really different? 

Not really, we still continue to learn thru visual, auditory and kinesthetic methods!  As I mentioned earlier, studies have been done on this subject and it’s safe to say that each person does have a “preferred” method of learning.  The question is which method dominates your individual learning process? 

As a first step, I’d suggest recalling your past learning experiences… Did you learn best during lecture hall courses or hands-on classes in school?  Probably the most successful courses for students are those that “tell” (auditory) you what your going to do, “show” (visual) you an example of what your going to do, and then provided “hands-on” (kinesthetic) tutorials for you to practice what you’ve heard and seen. 

Another way could be to look at some self-help books like; The Three Boxes of Life by Richard Nelson Bolles, and Type Talk At Work by Otto Kroeger both have chapter on discovering your dominate learning and personality traits.

And of course you can always go to the Internet!  A quick Google search on “learning style tests” will give you a few hundred thousand links to check out.

In summary, for some people it’s watching how a colleague approaches their work, for others reading a manual or working through tutorials work wonders; still others prefer to engage in eLearning tools, or CD courseware.  But in the end, there is nothing as valuable as an experienced coach who can interrupt the program, apply it to your task and guide you through the details of the features by telling, showing and guiding you with examples to make sense of the basic and advanced topics you need to apply the program to your profession.

There are a variety of ways that people learn…

ü      Classroom-based training

ü      Peer-to-Peer training

ü      Distance Learning

ü      eLearning, or Web-based Training

ü      Self-taught Learning

ü      Computer-based Training

In the past you may have looked at the pros & cons to each of these methods as simply being the time or cost for each option.  But now you have a couple of other factors to consider… company goals and your best learning method!

In the next edition we’ll take a look at what you should expect to get from a training course.  Along with how you can evaluate where your skills stand today, and where they need to be for the future.

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