Presentation vs. Training 3

[zdas04]

I recently had an audition for a teaching position at a well known training company. My instructions were to prepare a 15 minute presentation on any subject of my choosing. Since it was a training gig, I pulled 15 min of information from my 2-day course. The course is intended to be instructional.

At the end of all the auditions, one of the senior instructors said "At [this company] we never do presentations, we transfer information". He said it like his words had some profound meaning. I would have just blown past it, but at my last class one of the course evaluations said that the class felt more like a "presentation than a class".

Does anyone have any ideas as to how a "presentation" becomes "training" and what the difference is?

David

 

[MikeHalloran]

My (amateur) take:

At a presentation, you tell/show me what you know.
I listen, maybe take notes, and may or may not absorb any of it. I.e., you transmit, I may or may not receive, and no measurement is made of what was received.

At a training session, you tell/show me what you know.
Then I spit it back in some form, maybe a quiz, or these days by answering questions on a computer.
OR I apply the information you have transmitted to a problem that you didn't present, in order to gauge how much of it I have actually received.

These days, again, my input goes into a computer that provides some kind of measurement, and may adaptively modify what is presented next, or vector me to remedial material, and recurses until I demonstrate that I'm starting to 'get it'.

IOW, training, computerized or not, includes quizzes, questions, or other feedback mechanisms, that in turn are used to adapt the presentation to the speed and efficacy of reception.

For example:
You might give a presentation on how to disassemble an engine. You might even actually do so during the course of the presentation.

In training, you would provide instruction, guidance, critique, and so forth, but I, the student, would actually handle the wrenches.


OR, the training company representative might have meant something else entirely. From my outside perspective, education seems to comprise mostly polysyllabic BS.






Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[zdas04]

I think "polysyllabic BS" encapsulates my initial reaction. Had I not heard the criticism twice in a short period I would have blown it off.

But your distinction of a Presentation not requiring the learner to demonstrate learning seems valid. I'll work on that (maybe the audition should have been a 5 minute presentation and a 10 minute quiz?). I know my 2-day course fails completely in the requirement that the learner demonstrate learning. I was already working on adding exercises and quizzes (turning the 16 hours of intense lecture into into a week-long course by adding about 4 hours of arithmetic, doing 4-hours/day of lecture and 4 hours/day of breaks, lunch, exercises, and quizzes). Maybe I'll get past the distinction.

David

 

[Ron]

David,
I view training as more interactive than a presentation. In a presentation you tell them stuff. In training, you engage them and ask for input and answers. They have to be as much a part of the process as you.

Ron

 

[tygerdawg]

Quizzes & evaluations are useful and force a little bit of seriousness in the students/attendees. It can also be a matter of style as much as anything else.

For example a co-worker made a presentation where it was clear he spent more effort creating animations and cutesy crap using PPT functionality than he did trying to make a point or transfer knowledge. He was drawn & quartered by the CEO in front of everyone: terrible behavior of the CEO and terribly painful to watch my coworker pilloried like that. My presentation was based on the style I developed as a trainer. No cutesy crap, visually simple & directed, present the facts, walk the audience through the learning process from goal summary through start-finish to finality, supply references to offline data, & ask for feedback at every step to make sure they are getting the information I am trying to transmit. I was lucky that day as it was well received not only the CEO but by everyone in attendance. I certainly don't claim to be perfect about this, but is just something to consider.

TygerDawg
Blue Technik LLC
Virtuoso Robotics Engineering

http://www.bluetechnik.com

 

[TheTick]

Training is for imparting new skills. Anything less is just a show.

 

[rmw]

To me a presentation is when you do a design and present what you did to the huddled masses for their observation and/or learning and/or approval. For example, slide with a bolted joint and a caption "I calculated the bolt stresses and found them to meet the requirements of ASME XYZ."

Training is ..."next we have to calculate bolt stresses. First determine the grade of bolt to be used. Look up the YS (or allowable stress, or whatever) for that grade from Table ABC. Determine the thread root area by calculating thusly or consulting MNOP. Then divide the world by the moon and multiply by the stars, etc, blah, blah, and you determine the maximum stress that the bolt is capable of. Now look in ASME XYZ paragraph 123 and check your result against the requirements of table 12.

Now your test will be: given a flange with Quantity X bolts of A193 B7 bolts of 7/8" diameter is used on a vessel with 122 pressure and an operating temperature of AAA having a blind flange of X pipe size....... Determine if the bolts will meet the code.

Hopefully the training will have given them everything they need to pass the test. The presentation didn't and wasn't designed to.

rmw

 

[SomptingGuy]

I worked on a very wide-ranging simulation project in the early 90's, using a combination of a commercial product, much user coding and a lot of really good validation data.

I was invited to present the work at a user conference run by the vendor. I was also asked to run a training course for the customers. Same work, but totally different requirements. The presentation was a taster, with nothing too deep given away, hopefully attracting more work from new clients (as it did). The training was completely hands-on, showing all my workings.



- Steve

 

[MintJulep]

Teaching is a skill that must be learned and practiced. Think back to your days at school. You had good teachers and bad teachers.

 

[IRstuff]

One can go back to the beginning and look at "training" as pertains to apprenticeships. Back in the days when whipping an apprentice was an acceptable practice, the apprentice NEVER got any "presentations" and their training consisted of them actually doing the work while the master observed and corrected, and whipped, or not.

Nowadays, of course, we do expect that trainees actually absorb knowledge from the fonts that are the masters, and the whole process is compressed from many years into 2 days. Isn't modern progress amazing?

Of course, I'm an absolute firn believer in learning by doing. In many instances, booklearning without a personal or work-related project to work on results in possibility high transmission, but relatively poor reception, and even poorer retention.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize

 

[DerPumpeMeister]

The major difference between a presentation and training is the reciprocal communication. Training should include regular feedback from the audience (students).

I give presentations quite often, but have on occaision been required to provide training to operators of our equipment. Since I cannot physically have the equipment present, it is difficult to actively involve the audience. Therefore I generally try to ask for a lot feedback and limit how long I am the only person speaking. I also like to provide a workbook or manual to assist during training classes.

http://www.EngineeringGuideBook.com

 

[Twoballcane]

I've been to a few conferences and the way I look at it is presentations are what you give for free with scant power point slides to entice and training is what the audience will pay to be exposed to the rest of your ideas and methods.

Tobalcane
"If you avoid failure, you also avoid success."

 

[zdas04]

The thread I see developing here is a presentation is an information dump without audience participation. Training is a presentation with the requirement for the audience to demonstrate their understanding of the material.

I'm starting to get it--the first guy was full of crap (my class had quite a bit of back and forth, no quiz or formal exercises, but a lot of questions for the class to ponder) and the second guy had some unrealistic expectations for a 15 minute time slot.

Thanks everyone.

David

 

[TheTick]

One thing I will say about my navy training: the goals were always clear. Instructors wasted very little time on anything that did not relate to the detailed list of objectives we were given at the start of our coursework.

I worked for a couple different companies teaching standardized test prep. Each had their own culture (one was far more professional than the other), but both had their own language to describe what they wanted that made little sense to the uninitiated.

I'm sure you'd be a great teacher, Dave. They'd be fools to pass you up on account of such nitpickery.

 

[rmw]

I agree with the "information dump" as a definition of presentation but disagree about the audience participation part. To me, in a presentation, the audience is trying to learn something or be shown something, but it fits within their current level of training.

Training on the other hand, assumes that the audience knows noting or very little about the subject being taught and will by some process when it is completed.

I make presentations all the time to peers who may well be better trained on the topic than I am. I also do trainings where my beginning point is that the audience knows very little to nothing about the topic and when I get done with them, well, they will be experts, won't they?

rmw

 

[MintJulep]

How about this.

When giving a presentation you have a script of what you want to say, and you don't deviate from the script.

A good teacher is constantly reading the audience, looking for signs of comprehension or confusion, and digresses from the script when he or she sees that the point is not getting across.

 

[IRstuff]

"When giving a presentation you have a script of what you want to say, and you don't deviate from the script."

Rarely does that happen; only if I get to duct-tape everyone's mouth ;-)

TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize

 

[Ron]

I'm sure you'd be a great teacher, Dave. They'd be fools to pass you up on account of such nitpickery.

I agree. You don't mince words and you present your points clearly. Besides that, you've got a ton of relevant experience to back it up.....and it's something you clearly like and want to do. Pretty damned good combination, I'd say.

 

[zdas04]

I'm blushing, thanks for the kind words. There were 6 of us auditioning for an unknown number of positions, the other guys were really strong (3 PhD's and a JD and a couple of hundred years of experience amongst us), so I don't know how it'll turn out. If I don't end up teaching (their material) for them, I'll certainly find a way to continue teaching (not "presenting") my own material for someone else, it is just too much fun to stop.

David

 

[casseopeia]

I would compare this to a dance presentation, a performance, where your audience watches what you can do. Trained dancers may pick up a move or two, but won't be able to replicate the choreography or maybe even some of the technique.

A dance workshop where I would instruct dancers on the choreography is different. You can teach the same material, but at a completely different pace. We call it breaking down the move or the choreography. I would not expect feedback from the students so much as questions or requests for clarification, etc. The feedback is individual and comes from the mirror.

But I'd also expect a different setting for the training vs presentation. A presentation occurs on a 'stage' and your audience is fairly immobile. Training occurs in a large studio and the students are able to move around and expected to replicate what they observe.

Was the setting like that, or was it more of a lecture hall with seats? Where do their training sessions occur, a shop or lab? I guess I would have expected the people requesting the audition to have made that clear. Maybe next time you are asked to do a 'presentation', you should ask what the setting will be just to be clear what is expected of you.


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