training trouble looking for advice

Sounds like a job for some heavy "DRUGS"

Mark

 

Hi all,

I'm at a new job - my 3rd in 17 years! Anyhow, part of my new
responsibilities is to train an older staff member sw. The person I'm
training is intelligent etc yet has very little computer experience and
almost 0 cad experience of any kind. I'm trying to balance the pressure's
of coming on mid stream into a number of large projects (including masses
of sw assemblies with in-context relationships between un-mated parts,
parts that are not symetrical to their own origins and other such
treasures!) as well as hand-holding someone who today asked me for the 20th
time what the (f) means in front of a part!

I have to say - I'm not handling this as well as I would like. I do not
mind teaching but find limited or non-existant patience for people who ask
the same question more than once. To me it implies they don't care, can't
take notes, can't remember or are just planning on eating up my time as a
living breathing help file. The hit on my productivity is huge.

I've been using 3d parametric design software almost full time for 10 years
now and this is very frustrating.

Just venting and looking for some coping strategies if anyone has them...!

Thanks,

Zander

 

Zander,

Seriously though, it's just possible that the person is incapable of
learning at his age. How old are we talking about ??

I was once given the task of teaching Mastercam to a person who had been
writing code by hand for twenty years. No computer skills, nothing.

This person could only learn tasks, not methods. That is, I could teach him
how to do a specific task, but he couldn't use the information to perform a
similar task at a later time. Very frustrating. I finally ran out of
patience and had to cut him loose. He wasn't all that old though.

Mark

 

Zander, my condolences, but the situation could become a very positive
thing for both you and the "older" staff member if you handle it right.
He is having difficulty concentrating and paying attention and/or has
some basic conceptual problem/limitation. We all get ADD eventually
<G>, so I hope someone will be patient with me when the time comes.
This guy is probably getting worried about his job (if he's not, perhaps
he should be) and probably somewhat technophobic. Using a little humor
and also letting the guy know that you care about whether he's
uncomfortable might help some. Explaining with humor or with a story
why paying full attention to what one is doing is crucial/central to
success at anything might help him focus for a few minutes, and a few
minutes might be enough to get the guy over the hump. He needs some
confidence. Help him by teaching a little Zen. If you don't know a
little Zen, read "The Way of the Peaceful Warrior" by Dan Millman or
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Ron Di Santo and Tom
Steele. They're good reading, even if they don't help, but you'll find
little parables and things that you can use in both of them.

'Sporky'

 

Welcome to my life

 

Oops, my mistake. Author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
was Robert Pirsig.

 

Holy crap, someone else wrote a book called "Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance" besides Robert Pirsig?!

ca

 

Go easy on him. I bet he's just overwhelmed
with the computer and software. Once he starts
to get used to it. He'll start to memorize all the
commands and ask less stupid questions.

 

sounds to me like you may be trying to bring him on too fast--particularly
if you're expecting him to make sense of the messed-up files you've
described. Troubleshooting is a relatively advanced skill.

Perhaps focus on parts for a little while, and leave the assemblies aside
until he's got a better grasp?

 

I also taught at a VAR as well and to me (without reading what anyone
else wrote) the people that always did the best in my classes were
graphic designers because they had actual windows experience.
Engineers typicall only know log in and start CAD. Then moving to
something that emulates a Windows program as much as SolidWorks does is
very difficult for the engineers that I trained to grasp. I would send
this gentleman to a Basic windows class first to learn the fine arts
of: right click, using files in windows explorer, minimize, insert and
tools pull down.....I could go on but teaching him these basics will
really make learning SolidWorks much easier. Hope this helps.

Ken M,

 

It will probably worth your while buying one of the computer base training
programs for SW (eg Solid Professor) as it covers all of the basics and he
can learn it (an re-watch it) at his own pace.

Merry

 

On a visit to Malaysia, I tried to learn a little of the language.
But, I didn't have much success in the 2 weeks I was there. Even
people's names were difficult if they were oriental sounding. I think
the sounds were just too foreign to me. Apparently the task of
remembering a very foreign thing, is much harder than remembering
things which use familiar components.

Perhaps another analogy is when a person is sorting mail into
existing mail slots, vs. trying to do it by placing them in piles on a
small desk. On the desk you quickly run out of space and try to pile
some of the mail on the computer type writer, or phone, etc... but
quickly start to have difficulty where each alphabet is piled. The
task becomes much harder than sorting the mail where each letter
already has a pre-arranced slot to store.


I suspect that learning anything on the computer is a very similar
situation for a complete novice. That mysterious box just has too many
new concepts for a person to organize their learning into familiar
slots. It is just going to take time. But, perhaps it is important to
continue to use the computer for tasks like E-mail or word processing,
then as they get mastered continue to learn new things. Really, that
is the way we all learned the computer.

Joe Dunfee

 

I've been asked to train people before. Usually others are quite
motivated, but I've never had to train anyone from ground-up like
you've been asked to do.

Simple tactic: Refuse to teach anyone who is not taking notes. Perhaps
get a stack of memo pads (a special color would be nice) to distribute
to your "students", so they have a special place for CAD lore. Then
make it a requirement to have this book present for help.

 

Yaaa . . . I had corrected myself already by the time you posted.
Apparently your news reader was a little slow. The authors of
"Guidebook to Zen ATAOMM" are Ron Di Santo and Tom Steele. Since I
don't keep many authors' names in my head (neuron limitation -- most of
them having been burnt out in college) I had to refer to Amazon.com, and
I wasn't looking carefully enough.

'Sporky'

 

... Author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

Wow, hadn't thought about that in many years. Time to read it again.

 

Finally, after a lot of years training, I have finally figured out why
some people, (often older men, and also a slight majority of women) have
difficulty with learning windows based stuff. There are just to many
damn icons, drop downs, dialog check boxes, and of course to many damn
ways to do something. This finally came to light, when I was trying to
help my wife learn a particular program. There are so many options, it
is just incredibly overwhelming to some people. The reason the guy keeps
asking you what the (f) is for, is when you are explaining it, he is
looking around at the million other things, plus the twelve things you
are zipping through at once. And his brain can't even focus on your
answer. Those of us that pick this up pretty quick, usually play around,
until we find a sequence or pattern that fits in our head. But basically
we see all the icons, and other stuff, as things to try, whereas the
ones who struggle, don't see it as fun, but rather very daunting.
Especially with windows, that stuff moves around, or at least to them it
does. They are paranoid, that they won't be able to find it, when they
need it again. Also, most of the wizards I have worked with, are
incredibly horrible teachers, and often insensitive to new learners, and
a bit on the "look at me, and see all the things I can do, attitude. New
learners don't give a crap about what you can do, unless you are
sensitive to their lack of experience.

My wife likes things to stay in the same place, she doen't think it is
FUN to go looking for them, ever. There is a woman that I work with,
that HATES windows. She Loves DOS, Why, cause there is only one little
blinking c:/ to look at, and she always remembers the four or five
commands to make it work. give me a hammer, a pair of pliers, etc over a
stupid multiwondertool any day. That's how she sees it.

If you could step back in time with this guy, and train him on like
SW98 or so, there weren't even half the number of icons, functions etc.
Now just look at all the crap. Many features have at least two, some
have three starts! Drop down, and one or two icons. Look at all the crap
that is on the right mouse button. Sure you can turn most of it off, but
who ever does? The whole right mouse button is a huge mystery to a lot
of new users. They say, crap, how did you do that!!! they didn't see you
click it, and Wham there is a whole string of choices they have NEVER
even seen before. It's like magic to them. Black Magic. So go easy on
this guy, turn of all the stupid toolbars that are cluttering up the
screen, and only let him see a few options. SW95 only had like what,
three/four toolbars?? what are we up to now, 15 or something total
toolbars? The whole interface stayed basically the same for 5-6 years,
now it changes every version. For some people that is fun, a new look,
more stuff to play with etc.

ca

 

Zander,
I had a similar experience about 15 years ago with a guy who worked
for me, the company had just bought Euclid (not the easiest of systems
to pick up) - this guy was a good designer and he had spent nearly 30
years on the drawing board - he had never used a computer.

I sent him on the training course (3-4 weeks in total) and he came
back with a fried brain!

Anyway, to cut a long story short we had a chat and agreed that the
best way forward would be to ease him in gently by first of all buying
a seat of ACAD LT and getting him used to working on the PC in 2D.

After a couple of months he was proficient at 2D and computer literate
it wasn't long before he was pushing to give the 3D system another go.

OK so productivity was down for a couple of months but at the end of
the day a good designer is a valuable asset and for us taking the time
to get him up to speed was well worth it in the end.

Kev

 

Hi Zander, I feel your pain. I too, have a sad story about training people
in SW. I had to train three Russian co-workers in SW for 3 hours@day@3
times@week for 8 weeks. They were on AutoCAD and were kicking and screaming
about having to learn 3D SW. There were all older than me (I'm 47) one woman
and two men. Two of the three epitomized the saying, "You can't teach old
dogs new tricks." In addition to training them SW, there language skills
were not very good either. They all had about 2 - 5 years of living in
America. So I had that barrier also. Not to mention that they also had no
skills with simple windows commands like "copy" and Paste" and other
computer skills that anyone has when working in basic windows programs.

I will say that of the three, there was one that excelled above the other
two, Vadim. I am sure it is with all apprentices, some have it and some
don't . Vadim, excelled farther than the rest, took it upon himself to work
after hours, unpaid, with a SW training book, going through each lesson,
step by step. The
other things I noticed about him were these: he was very thankful to me for
training him (gave me candy and other food items) this helped me help him. I
won't put up with unthankful people when I am imparting knowledge and MY
time to him. And he was way more humble than the other two. An finally, as
opposed to the person you are training, Vadim took a LOT of notes. And he
used them. I would feel that if a person didn't take notes, you may be
wasting your time. That shows disrespect to you.

The lady I was training, Inna, she sometimes would ask me the same question
two or three times a day.
And when she went on a two week vacation and came back, I think she forgot
all the training I gave her. Its like I had to show her every thing again.
This didn't go well with me, and when the lay-offs came later in the year,
she didn't make the cut.

I would talk to your boss if this person continues with a lackadaisical
attitude about learning SW. Training is very expensive, and if this person
is NOT motivated to learn SW, then he should be left to his own devices.

That's my two cents.

Dan Bovinich
Energy Conversion Devices
www.swcad.com

 

I'm so glad I posted this topic here. Everyone who replied has
contributed at the very least in helping me find motivation for going
forward with this task. At the moment I've sent him back to basics
doing 'online tutorials' and working with the sketcher and the simple
parts. Future progress will be at a slower and more methodical pace.
I think the main thing I've figured out is that I need to impart to
hime that HE is responsible for actually learning SW - not me. The
things he has stumbled on or figured out himself are the ones that
stick best.

thanks,

Zander