Why won’t IT companies learn how to do online training properly?

(rescuing old posts from an old platform)

My day job is best described as an IT Solution Architect; that means people tell me their business problems and if appropriate, I choose bits of software and hardware that might help, and write a plan for how to stick those bits together to solve the problem.

As a result I often need to learn about new products and compare them. Classroom-based courses cost $10,000 per week plus hotels, and involve travelling without my family on specific dates in three months’ time to shitty places that I already decided I didn’t want to live (Sydney, Melbourne or Auckland) and will tie me financially to my employers (who want me to pay back training costs if I leave). I want to learn from the comfort of my own desk without mortgaging my soul to my employer.

The best way I’ve found to get training under these circumstances is to register with each potential supplier and use their online training to learn about their products. A bonus is usually that if I pass an exam at the end, my employer can get partner discounts if we do end up selling it.

The way I deal with so many of these on-line courses is by watching them at home in the evening, once the kids are asleep, on my exercise bike so I can get some exercise after another day of sitting on my arse listening to salespeople. This also helps me make up hours for my timesheet after yet another school activity requires I take some hours out of work during the week.

As a result, my ideal training module is a 40 minute YouTube video I can Cast to my TV.

Hardly anyone does their online training like this.

I want these companies to realise that while I’m using their training, I’m forming an opinion of the company, before I’ve bought anything. Many times, the main thing I’m learning is that I hate them and everything they make.

The Training System and Modules

Here are the ways billion dollar technology companies make their training painful:

• Training Systems that require shitty 1990's plugins like Java, Flash or Silverlight to work. Please just make this stuff work in any modern browser.
• Training Systems that pop up messages telling you “For best results, please us Internet Explorer 6!”
• Training Systems that don’t remember how far through a training module you got, and make you sit through the whole module again if you restart it.
• Training Systems that require you set up a new logon, separate to any other login you already have. Please just let me log in with my work email address, a Google Account, but don’t make me create a whole new identity in yet another system. These aren’t TOP SECRET government plans, they are your marketing material, that you WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW ABOUT! In fact, why do you need me to login? Why not just stick this training on YouTube?
• Slow (15 second) response times to load next module (this was especially unfunny when I was trying to access training for a company that claims it can accelerate application performance over the Internet)
• Modules that finish then dump you two clicks away from where you can watch the next module.
• Presenters reading PowerPoint slides, with no option to speed up to 1.25x or 1.5x. I get bored because I’ve already read the slides before you’ve finished the third word.
• Whole modules of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about your competitors. Name Calling at your competitors makes you look like you don’t believe in your own product, and makes me wonder what kind of internal culture your organisation has. I don’t mind a comparison between your product and other similar products, but don’t start comparing your apples to their orange peels.
• The CEO presentation welcoming me to the training with a 15 minute ramble about the history of the company and the entire product line and how good growth is going to be; they’re wasting my time. Put that video on YouTube for your shareholders to jack off too, cos that’s the only people who care about that shit.
• Needy presentations that require constant clicking on the NEXT button to work — as I’ve said I try to watch these training courses when I’m on my exercise bike or cooking, and I don’t appreciate having to keep clicking a button every 30 seconds. Your making your training useless to me. I will watch a competitors video instead.
• Out of date content — I don’t care about the awards you won 5 years ago.
• Presenters in slow motion— some of these people present as if they have been taken prisoner, sleep deprived, starved and then forced to present the solution at gun point. I’ve seen British Tornado pilots talk about Saddam Hussein more enthusiastically. Make sure your videos have a speed option of 1.25x or 1.5x if you are going to use these people.
• Presenters with a strong accent. I know your global expert is your global expert, but if an English person like me can hardly understand what they are saying, then you’re shutting out not just me, but any customers with English as a second language. If it can’t be avoided, putting some subtitles on the videos.
• Text-to-speech voices on the presentations — these are so robotic they drive me nuts. Especially when they can’t pronounce your proprietary technology names.

The Exam Experience

Some companies run proper exam processes that require you to travel 5 hours to a city to sit an exam, so that Pearson Vue can make some money. I don’t have budget to travel and the certification is a joke anyway, so why not stick the exam online?

When the exam is online, here are ways that companies make them frustrating:

• Questions where you have to answer “True” to questions like “Is Competitor Y’s Product shit?”
• Online exams with 100% pass rates that test you on stuff you would look up in a manual anyway.
• Multi choice questions that don’t tell you how many are right answers you are trying to pick out of the list.
• Testing technical staff on non-technical information. I honestly don’t care who else is the same Gartner Magic Quadrant as you, or what your revenue was last year. How does the fucking product work?
• FIGJAM (Fuck I’m Good, Just Ask Me) questions like “Is our product shit or AWESOME!!!!!:-)!!!111!” or “Is our product better than all our competitors” or multiple choice questions like “Is our product (a) awesome, (b) fantastic, © spectacular, (d) life-altering?” where the correct answer is “(e) All of the above”
• Exam questions with wrong answers loaded into the exam system, so you have to learn to answer the question with an incorrect answer to pass. It makes me doubt the quality of your product.
• Trick questions in the exam: “On the road to a sales call you meet seven customers, each with seven colleagues, all of whom are interested in Feature X. Is the opposite of Feature X ever not disabled by default negatively for however many people aren’t going to your sales call?” Do you want me to prove I learned about your product, or pass a logic test?
• Please, just put your training presentations on YouTube, and if there’s a certification I need to resell your product, make it test me on useful stuff, not sales bullshit or error codes I would look up in Google.