Re: Any advice for certificate training?

["Pro TechWriter" <pro -dot- techwriter -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Hi Jeff!

I want to provide an answer for one part that others haven't addressed. This
is based strictly on my experience teaching in a certification program, and
also creating the materials. So your mileage may vary :-)

First of all, the amount of materials on the slides is usually based on the
instructor's preferences. If you know who (or you have a "group of who")
will be doing the training, I would get myself right over there and talk to
that person, and ask for some existing presentations to look at. Also ask
them how much time they allow for each slide, but that will vary depending
on the subject matter.

For me, I usually figure times of one to five minutes per slide for
fact-based introductory material, like "you must do this to have this
result." For more advanced discussions, I have slides that say "Topic <Name>
- Discussion" "15 - 20 minutes" if there is an area that would be better
taught in a group discussion. This is good for classes with mixed levels of
ability on the topic: the more advanced students help the newer ones.
Usually, I start out with a question like "Now that we know that A does B,
John, how would you handle that if the results were C instead?" Usually I
did those at the end of a class period.

For an overall average, about ten minutes a slide is a reasonable estimate
for a baseline. That doesn't include breaks, lunch, discussions, or a few
minutes for starting and stopping time.

The classes I taught for certification were on the college quarter system,
and we met once a week for 3 hours each time per class topic. There were, on
average, 12 to 15 classes a quarter, depending on the time of year.

I hope this helps you.

Good luck with the project. It sounds interesting, and will be a great
project to list on your resume!

PT

On 6/12/07, Jeff Scattini <jeff -dot- scattini -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
>
> My manager's manager wants to create a comprehensive training system for
> one
> of our software products that will culminate in a certificate of
> competence
> to reassure the countries that we serve. The manager would like to start
> implementing this training system by the end of the year. The program is
> large and complicated and incredibly interdependent on different lines of
> parallel functions that eventually intersect to generate forms and
> reports.
>
> There are only two of us tech writers in the office, and my manager (the
> other tech writer) has created an outline for one module and has told me
> to
> "flesh it out." <snip>  Also, because this training is, at first, going to
> be
> accompanied with a physical instructor, I'm not sure how much information
> to
> put on the slides, and how much to put into the instructor's notes, if
>
>
> --
> PT
> pro -dot- techwriter -at- gmail -dot- com
> I'm a Technical Technical Writer!
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