Successes and New Tips to Ring in 2014

At the end of 2013, we asked readers to share the successes that they were excited about. Bruce Cronquist of Microsoft accepted the challenge and responded with some great ideas that other trainers can implement, too!

I am in charge of the training of the new hire testers that join Microsoft. The training includes blended learning, monthly lunches, a weekly blog, and more. I am continually using the training as a platform for experimentation and sharing the results of the experiments with the other knowledge engineers on my team. Here are a few of the more successful experiments:

When you can’t change the system, beat the system

My goal is to have the new hires complete the blended learning in the first week of their employment. The effectiveness of the jump start training diminishes quickly the longer they are employed. The learning management system (LMS) is set up to automatically enroll them in the training. It can take up to a week for their names to make it through the human resource system into the LMS. To work around this week-long delay, every Monday afternoon I hop over to HR’s New Employee Orientation (NEO) training and personally invite each tester to my training. This has the added benefit of me getting to know the NEO staff, building my network, and free snacks.

Practice makes perfect

We all know that doing something is the best way to learn something. When I inherited the course, it was a 50-minute instructor-led training listing resources and areas for the new employee to do further research on his or her own. I extended the class to include the testing of actual unreleased Microsoft products and internal tools as part of the class. The new hire testers get to experience a complete Product Life Cycle (PLC) as part of the class: learn about a product, create a test plan, carry out the tests, enter bugs and issues, work as a team to coordinate testing, and so on. This extension of the class has the added benefit of fresh eyes looking at products before they are shipped and filling in gaps in testing resources.

Automatic updating

The follow-up email originally was a list of resources sent after class. The problem with this is the links might not work after a few months as servers are renamed and resources moved between teams. The new email has a link to a web site that lists the resources. If a resource moves, I can edit it on that page. Everyone who has already taken the class will get the new link whenever they follow the link in the follow-up email.

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