Week 6, July 24-30, 2006:

This was a light week at work. We made our deadline, then made some minor fixes to the published training. Team members were relieved and giddy. I was finally able to schedule a lunch meeting with my supervisor, Peggy. She also assigned me to another project. As a reward to myself I went to see "An Inconvenient Truth" which was both scary and inspiring.

A Sense of Triumph

In the middle of last week there were a lot of worried executives. They thought we wouldn't make our deadline. At that time there were still a lot of things to correct and the simulations in a couple chapters had yet to be finished. On Friday the course was published on time. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Our team started getting email message from top executivcongratulationing us. My name was mentioned by the Vice President of Learning in an "all hands" meeting praising my contributions. A number of people came to my cubicle to personally congratulate me. Apparently, to be mentioned at this meeting is a real honor. Needless to say, I felt good.

There were others who worked much harder, especially Chris in San Francisco who pulled several all-nighters and worked the weekends to make the deadline. Being both a student and teacher, I'm used to working nights and weekends, so the extra work I did wasn't a stretch for me. Long hours do wear on you after a while. I hope for a more regular schedule, someday. But not because I'm out of work.

Meeting with Peggy

Peggy has been an Instruction Design professional for many years. Her career ranges from working for a defense contractor, a major manufacturer, dot com companies, and, now, the Bank of America. She's professional, hard-nosed, detail-oriented, passionate about training, very knowledgeable, and has some great war stories. She's also been more than kind toward me. She's been generous with her time and knowledge, given me a lot of encouragement, and fought to make sure I have what I need to do the work.

She began as a speech therapist, primarily for autistic children. She noticed a trend among her peers. They were dropping like flies. The work was burning most of them out within 2 to 5 years. She began looking for a new career.

Her parents, who lived in St. Louis at the time, invited her to stay there a while. Her father suggested she get a job with McDonald-Douglas. That's where she began her career in instructional design. The great thing about McDonald-Douglas, she observed, was that they are a defense contractor. This means that the model they used for instructional design comes straight from the military, the fountainhead of the field. She didn't like defence work that much, but she did discover she loved instructional design.

A year and a half later she moved back to Boston and got a Masters Degree in Instructional Design at Boston University. She also began working for the Gillette Company, which was headquartered in Boston. (They were recently purchased by Proctor & Gamble.) In fact, a few blocks from my office is where they make the razor blades. She really enjoyed working there. Her job was to help create the training for work procedures to manufacture some of their new products. This was a challenge because most workers did not speak English. This helped her learn the importance of knowing your audience.

The next most memorable times in her career, though not necessarily the best of times, was her stints with dot com startups. One dot com shall remain nameless and the other was monster.com. She didn't work long at either.

A friend, telling her about the millions of dollars employees were making through IPOs, lured her to work for the startup. She suggested Peggy work there a couple years, then cash out with a huge nestegg.

She recalls the first day she drove into the company parking lot in her sensible compact. Here was a Porsche, there was a Porsche, everywhere a Porsche. In fact there seemed to be nothing but Porsches, until she saw the Lamborghini. Later, she attended a company party. Everyone was dressed somewhat professionally, except for one guy in torn jeans, long hair and a t-shirt. She asked about him because he looked so out of place. He was the mail-room clerk -- and the owner of the Lamborghini.

The management was disorganized and money crazy. All they would talk about was their expensive cars and the latest homes they purchased. When they had meetings they would eventually devolve into shouting matches and nothing was decided.

Without doing any analysis they demanded training programs to teach the sales people how to increase sales. Soon Peggy realized no amount of training could help. The problem was one of motivation. When their company went public, before Peggy came onboard, all employees were given a large amount of stock that increased in value astronomically. However, they cannot sell that stock for at least a year after the IPO. She discovered the sales people didn't care about sales because they didn't have to work to make money. All they had to do was wait out that year making minimum effort. Then they could cash out, become millionaires, and retire.

She got out of there as soon as she could and is glad she did. It turns out their previous comptroller was backdating stock for people so they could take advantage of the IPO bonanza. This came to light when that comptroller left and was replaced by one who knew the law and was honest. When the new comptroller pointed out the illegality of backdating to management and refused to do it, she was fired for her troubles. She then reported them to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not only is this company now bankrupt, the employees are being investigated for insider trading. Large fines and jail time for some are in the offing. I wonder what happened to the Lamborghini?

Monster.com, was more of the same, though not nearly to the same degree. There, too, some employees are now being investigated for insider trading. The major problem with monster.com, according to Peggy, is that they kept changing their marketing plan every month. They couldn't decide what they really wanted to be or do, besides offer job listings. This was an impossible situation for a trainer. She often felt like a Den Mother to a group of Cub Scouts. Gratefully, she was laid off. Luckily, the Bank of America position fell into her lap soon after.

In my first post I mentioned that everyone here seemed to be with the company a short while. It was a mystery at the time. Now I know why. It's because the company has changed direction from growing through acquisition to growing organically by increasing the business from the customers they have. The divisions we service, Global Wealth InvestmentPremiereent and Premeire Bank & Investment, are two new groups dedicated to organic growth.

After her experience with the dotcoms she's glad to be somewhere that has a professional and careful approach to business. She said right now is a good time to be in training here because the bank is now very training-minded, and is very open to being much more innovative in how they conduct training. They are not just trying to be more innovative with training, they are also constantly innovating the way they do business, which creates a need for training.

Peggy also gave me some words of warning about this field. For any company, the training department is usually perennially under-funded and understaffed. This is good news and bad news. The good is you always have plenty to do. The bad is you can easily burn out if you don't pace yourself. Another negative to keep in mind is when there are layoffs, training is usually the first go and the last to be brought back.

When asked about the value of getting a PhD., she said at this level it wasn't necessary. However, if you wanted to work with leadership training and organization building a PhD. would be a real plus. She said organization building is less interesting than training, but the pay is higher.

Another place a PhD. would be needed is if you wanted to work in the educational technology department of some place like Harvard. Her dream is to be able to work there. She said it's nearly impossible to get in, but it's important to have a dream.

About My New Project

My new project is to take a current course that was last delivered live and convert it to one given online. In addition to the change from live to online, the product has been updated because of new regulations and some problems they had with it in the past. In my next post I'll write more about that experience.

Personal Notes:

An Inconvenient Truth

Last Tuesday I celebrated the completion of our project by treating myself to seeing, "An Inconvenient Truth." The global warming message was incredibly powerful and brought home by a brilliant series of computer generated graphics on PowerPoint type slides. The images of how many highly populated areas would be underwater if the seas only rose a few feet were especiasideffective. Putting asside the message of the movie, it was the way the information was presented that blew me away. They made a dull facts seem exciting and urgent.

This is my dream -- to combine my love of images, film, computers, animation and writing to create effective and compelling presentations that help teach others an important skill so they can advance in life -- or help give them the knowledge and wisdom needed to make this world a better place.

I told my roommate about this film. This morning, before I left for work, he showed me he bought Al Gore's book, An Inconvenient Truth. He said I inspired him to get it. At this time he doesn't know much about the environmental problems, but he now wants to educate himself about it. He said perhaps it was good Al Gore didn't become president. He suggested he would be remembered in history for awakening humanity to this problem.

Since he's in the Korean Foreign Service, who knows how his decision to study environmental issues will affect his nation or the world in the future. Perhaps he will become a high official in his government or even the United Nations and help influence a change. Time will tell.

SIGGRAPH is Coming! SIGGRAPH is Coming!

Even without Paul Revere I found out SIGGRAPH is coming to Boston July 30 - August 3. This is the 33rd Annual International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. I bought a ticket to attend. More to come next post.