Individual Development Plans

It is important to keep your goals on paper and ready for review and adjustment. I present to you, my humble individual development plan as I step into a new roll as small business owner.
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Individual Development Plan

Name – Tyler Matney
Title – Business Owner
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Competencies – The strengths I will be bringing to the table are abundant but I am humble and fully aware that I will need to development and improve on every front including this list of the top three that will aid in my success.

1.      Empathy and passion – I am fully aware of the fact that I will be holding the financial welfare of my employees in my care. I have always strived to aid others in their personal development. I became a professional trainer for this reason above all others. In this role I will be working with my team to not only grow this business, but allow them to grow with it.

2.      Broad vision and planning – I am a planner, and I enjoy looking far into the future when making present day decisions.

3.      Customer Centric – I love to please, and in the face of customers who keep my business running I will offer them a level of customer service they have never experienced.

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Weaknesses and Areas for Improvement – I continually work on all aspects of my professional skills, but these will be especially important.

1.      Money Management – I will be running on a “shoe string” budget for the first year. I will need to keep very close tabs on any and all unnecessary spending. I am one to attempt to implement technology solutions whenever possible, but for the first year I will need to exhibit patience and discipline to make sure the working capital is always available and not being used prematurely.

2.      Patience – I already know in this business I will be working with employees that are often lacking ambition. I am such an ambitious person that this can be a point of frustration. I am confident I can use my empathy to overcome this, but I know my patience will be tested regularly.

3.      Controlled Growth – I have such massive ambitions to grow this business that I need to be careful to not create a lack of resources to support the sales.

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Business and Development Goals – I have combined these two, so I can maintain a clear path for both myself and the business.

Long-Term – The long term goal is to build a business through careful planning, patient execution and world class customer service to the point that the business can be sold for at least $1M.

Short-Term – The short term goal is to get the business to a profitability level that allows for the onboarding of an operations manager. This key position will free me up to grow the business through sales and marketing and not be bogged down with operations.

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Next Assignment – The first goal is to gain the confidence of the current staff and grow the business to the point that they are working full time. I am aware of their concerns over the lack of business, and keeping them busy with full time work is paramount to their commitment to the business.

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Training and Development Needs – I will be networking with other small business owners that I already know to learn the best habits to success. I will also be consulting with a small business advisor, other franchise owners, accountant and previous owner of the business I am buying to make sure that changes I am implementing are getting the correct responses and the business is gaining traction. 

Technology. When, what and why?

You don't have to look far to see technology is (has) taken over our society. Being in the classroom, or any educational environment in general is no escape. We have technology all around us, and in many cases it is an incredibly valuable learning tool. However, it is the responsibility of the educator to make sure that when technology is being deployed as an educational resource that it is done-so with the correct reasoning. To often, you will find instances where technology is being used because it's the "cool" thing to do. It do not always aid the learning process. If it's not helping, why do it? 

With all of the technology that is out there, I am going to whittle it down to a handful that I find most fascinating and hopefully we can decide when these tools are appropriate and when you might just be showing off. 

I have had several spirited debates over the past few years on the application of social media in the classroom. I will stand by my opinion that it doesn't bring anything to the table, that can't be accomplished through more controllable avenues. So, what I just said there, is that I think social media is far to lawless for use in a learning context. There are several exceptions to this, but they are a diviation from what I consider to be the true social media. When I say social media, I mean FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, Dig and MySpace (is that still around?). In most teaching circles, anything on the web is lumped into social media like blogs, and wikis (Noe, 2011). Blogs and wikis are another problem I see as well, hence the reason you don't quote them in APA scholarly papers. Back to social media. Facebook is the primary culprit here. I have heard of classrooms using facebook as means of bringing the class together, and I personally don't see the point. It is an open opportunity for off topic exchanges, and it's extra work than simple emailing. Don't get me wrong, I love facebook. I'm on it about every 20 minutes all day...with my friends and family, not for school work. It's a social site, not a scholarly site, not a classroom aid, not a learning tool. 

The area that I am most excited about, but have seen the good and bad, is elearning. I have personally helped deploy two LMS programs, and I am a big fan. The potential is HUGE, but it needs to be kept within reason and is no excuse for not going through the proper steps of developing meaningful curriculum. I have recently seen a company head down a slippery slope. They took what was once a classroom class, and simply turned it into an LMS course. This has created an animosity for the LMS before they have even had a chance to try and teach something new. This is a good example of why it is so important to make sure that learning going through an LMS is done with intent, and the reasons are logical. The most logical reason I have experienced for an LMS, is ease of access, geographical distance, record keeping, and something more entertaining than listening to a lecture. Outside of those reasons, I believe we should really be evaluating why we are going the route of an LMS versus some other medium for content delivery. 

Noe brings up an interesting topic in the use of podcasts for learning. This is a good alternative to those situations where an LMS might be overkill. Podcasts still allow for quick, easy delivery of content. It also allows for the learning to listen to the content, when and where they want. The only down side is not being able to discuss the topic, it's just a sit and listen environment. However, with that hangup I believe the benefits far outweigh the downside. www.LearningTimes.com (2014) has a great article about the benefits of podcasts. I listed a couple, but they add portability, and affordability...both value adds to this concept. 

One step up in interaction, and in cost is going to a webcast or live webinar. I have much experience with webinars and they are a great tool. Perfect for sharing a power point and allowing discussion or if the group is to large for discussion, you can simply unlock the chat feature of a webinar site, and take questions via the chat feature. I conducted weekly sales training webinars for years, and always enjoyed the convenience. With websites like webex and gotomeeting.com, the cost is free of close to it depending on the features you  want. 

There are many options out there for using technology. Always make sure you are doing it for the benefit of the learner. If the technology is going to hinder learning, than head back to the drawing board. 

Resources

Noe, R. A. (2013). Employee training and development (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

www.LearningTimes.com. Unknown author. Article retrieved from: http://www.learningtimes.com/what-we-do/podcast-production/benefits/

Whole Foods - Needs Analysis

Once again, the "real world" strikes out and touches a class I am in. I applied for a regional training position a couple days ago in Seattle with Whole Foods. So, it only seems natural to orient towards this organization for my hypothetical needs analysis. 

Whole Foods lists an impressive set of core values, and as instructed by Noe (2013) the organization is always a good starting point. I need to clearly understand the direction, values, and mission of Whole Foods to better understand their training needs. Whole Foods is all about customer wellness through natural and organic foods. They do this through a phenomenal store experience as well as community support and education. 

There are, of course, many departments to a company as large as whole foods, there is a logistics, HR, sales, buyers, retail, marketing and the list goes on. I would like to focus my attention on the retail team and what training program may aid the company through this avenue. In approaching this team specifically, it is important to seek the input of key stakeholders (Noe, 2013). In this case, that would be retail management at the corporate level, as well as at the retail level. I have also learned that representation from category buyers as well as from vendors (manufacturers) would also be helpful in training a grocery retail team. 

Once these stake holders are in place it becomes necessary to now understand the target trainees and we approach this, according to Noe, through a Person Analysis. This process will show us who needs training, and in this case we may find it to be newly hired employees, recently promoted employees or low performing team members...or a combination of any of these or possibly other variables. 

With the target now identified, we begin the next phase of this analysis by focusing our attention on what performance level these individuals need to be at, and where they are coming from. This can be done with the aid of the key stakeholders listed above and using any number of performance improvement techniques. During this performance gap discovery phase, it would important to obtain any and all documentation that could be used as a measurement medium. Having data from before a training effort certainly helps in validation post-training. 

In this example, I believe a combination of interviews and focus groups would be the best approach to a company like Whole Foods. I have actually worked with Whole Foods in the past, as a national account manager selling into their stores from the vendor side of the business. They have a very personal approach to business and face to face meetings are far more of a normality that video calls or phone calls. They also frequently like to meet in the cafe area of one of their stores. Conducting casual interviews would allow for an open safe dialog about the true training needs and not mask them behind a more official meeting environment. The focus groups are another effort to accomplish the same things, but by allowing different key stakeholders to bounce ideas off one another and allow the conversation to gain some speed. 

Through the proper people, having safe conversations, we can assess the business needs and determine the current performance and end goal for performance. By doing this carefully and methodically a proper course of action can be laid out allowing for the objectives of the business to be met. 

Reference 

Noe, R. A. (2013). Employee training and development (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

What's really going on...

    I have recently been learning about something that I think may interest you. It’s the difference between, training, instruction and education. I know they all seem like similar things but you were just telling you don’t really buy into the “training” thing, and given the situation you may be 100% correct. I mean, take the word training for instance. You train your dog to do something, you don’t education or instruct your dog. So it turns out that the term training is something you teach someone and that something becomes automatic, like the alphabet for example. Now instruction is something very different, it’s more generalized. I can teach you concepts and I may give you 10 examples of this one objective, but in the real world, you may find a new one…but if I instructed you correctly you’ll be able to apply that instruction to this new situation. The last one is Education, which again is different than the other two terms. Education is expanding the learning well beyond a single scenario like instruction does. Education will allow you handle a much wider range of situations and education often comes from experiences that aren’t even taught at all, but rather learned through experience.  So if you think about the quote “training” you’ve had, you’re right! it may not have been of a huge value, but it might have been a good starting point for you to get further instruction, and ultimately become educated on the topic. They all compliment one-another but they aren’t applicable to each thing that we need to learn.

As my master's program progresses, I am recycling this blog to meet the need of the next course in my program.

Welcome to Training and Development Systems. 

Rule 1 - Security, Rule 2 - See Rule 1

It's almost impossible to do anything in technology nowadays without hearing about security risks. Your computer can get a virus, your cell phone can be hacked, the credit card swiper may have been tampered with...it's never ending. Some of these things you may be able to mildly ignore for a little while longer, but throwing caution to the wind when it comes to the security of your eLearning content, platform, and users is not something to take likely! 

When it comes to security, it's not necessarily about a "product", but more about policy and practices. I located a very interesting article by Najwa Alwi and Ip-Shing Fan (2010) titled, E-Learning and Information Security Management. This article is all about protecting your content, site and students. I recommend you read the whole thing, but I will give you the highlights here. 

There are 11 listed threats in the article, but when reading through them we can narrow them down into three general categories. 

1. Intentional mischievous attacks (hacking, viruses etc.)
2. Technical problems (System hardware failure, server problem, bugs etc.)
3. Human error (Making a change to the system that caused issues)

Take an intentional preventative course of action against all three of these, and you will at least have a head start on staving off problems. The first one may just flat out be bad luck, but you can do some things to help yourself safe. When it comes to hackers, they usually get in through a worthless password (usually "password" or "12345"). Don't even allow your users to use such passwords. You may have noticed a trend in online passwords that you have to use a capital letter, numbers, lower case letters, special characters and sometimes you can't have more that two matching characters in a row. I know it is tough to throw an exclamation point at the end....but it's the safe thing to do! There are settings within most LMS platforms that allow you to closely regulate what passwords will be allowed, as well as how often they should be reset. Set this stuff tight, it's a healthy dose of preventative security. 

Technical problems can be really tough, because you can't see them coming, and most of us mortal LMS users won't be able to do anything but call our LMS provider or host in a panic. Using a reputable provider with redundant servers and other fancy things that you and I won't understand is what we need to look for. Just ask them how they protect against the system going down, and then ask them to repeat themselves in English for you. 

Lastly, there is human error. The inevitable mistake of checking the wrong box, saving the wrong thing, overwriting something you didn't mean to do...or maybe not saving when you should have. From my experience, the best measure of control, is limiting access to the vitals to as few people as possible. The other measure of success I have incorporated is not allowing students to make account changes, and loading all student profiles through uploading an excel spreadsheet. I can very easily keep an excel spreadsheet with clearly labeled column headers. By keeping this on excel sheet, I can very easily make sure that all columns are filled in, and that they are filled in correctly. I upload new users on a weekly basis by building a spreadsheet based on a payroll report (how you get student data may vary wildly). I add columns to this report for password and user name, adjust their user groups as I need, and then I just upload the file to the LMS and all of these users are up and running immediately. 

Check with your LMS provider for the best way to get users uploaded, but all of them that I am aware of will work with excel spreadsheets, and many will work with CMR programs like salesforce.com. 

Be safe out there! 

Resources

Ribble, M. (n.d.). Nine elements: Nine themes of digital citizenship. Retrieved May 30, 2012, from http://www.digitalcitizenship.net/Nine_Elements.html

Can you see me now?

Your new LMS is certain to be a hit if you have done your homework, and used the amazing resources and products that have flooded the market place. There is another angle to your new LMS that you may not have even realized!

The beauty of an LMS is the ability to offer learners content at their own pace, in their own time...anytime. However, some occasions will still call for face to face to teaching, and your LMS doesn't have to fall short. Not every LMS will have a built in tool for live video conferencing but most do. If yours does not, it will most likely have at least a scheduling tool so you can post an upcoming "classroom" style course with all the pertinent details so your users can sign up just and know where to be to attend the class.

Once you've figured out if you can do video conferencing on your LMS or not, you may want to look into features of actual video conferencing software to help your class have the best possible experience. Like I said, some LMS platforms will have a built in tool that will access your computer's webcam, and micrphone and allow you to round up your students for a face to face learning session. Other times you will need to know what is out there to help you get your students together.

In each of these cases, you will at the very least need a device with a camera, microphone and speaker (which means just about everything like your cell phone, tablet, laptop, and PC will all work).

Everyone likes free! There are a host of free video conferencing tools out there. There are some important things to know about these versus ones that cost money. Quality is the first thing that comes with a better video conferencing program. Video conferencing software, to techy folks, is called a "codec" which stands for compression and decompression. Better codecs can take better quality video and audio and "compress" it to a smaller size, allowing better quality images and audio. If you've ever done a video conference from iPhone to iPhone using the famous and free face time program offered by Apple, you'll know how poor the quality can be. Face Time is a very low quality codec, and this is why your video and audio suffer. You are also doing this across a cellular signal in most cases and that doesn't help your cause. Using wifi will improve things a bit, but it's still a low quality free codec. Other free codecs include Google Hang Out, Skype (wildly popular), and Oovoo. The other limitation to these free codecs aside from quality, is the number of people you can have in one call. For classroom style lessons, it's frequently a larger group of users, and most of these are limited to three users.

The first step up in my opinion, is WebEx.com. WebEx is very popular with small to medium businesses and classrooms alike. For about $40 a month, you can have up to 25 users on a video conference, and only the host has to pay a penny for the service.

Beyond an affordable solution like webex, you can start to look into more of a large corporate business solution. Companies like Polycom, Cisco and Life Size are rolling out amazing software codecs. I spent some time in the medical technology realm, and software codecs where starting to take the forefront over traditional hardware codec systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

No matter what route you go, I would recommend making sure your students have a way to reach out to you face to face. Video conferencing systems allow for remote desk top assistance, as well as file sharing, and some other terrific tools for learning and collaborating. Check out this article for a longer list of codecs that might meet your needs. http://www.computerworld.com/s/ article/9234680/7_low _cost_ videoconferencing_services_Which_is_best_for_your_meeting_?taxonomyId=86&pageNumber=1

Resources

www.polycom.com
www.cisco.com
www.lifesize.com
www.skype.com
www.google.com/hangout
www.apple.com/ios/facetime