Many technical trainers do little more than recite what you can easily read in the text book. In this article, we will take a look at how you can create an engaging technical training class from day one.
I always begin each technical training class with a personal mission: Create a fun, positive, interactive learning environment in which people participate their way to knowledge.
In a technical training class, your audience-the students-will always be comprised of a disparate set of individuals. Some folks may have self-financed their training to boost their career potential and others are attending training on the company dime and sometimes view their training as a mini-vacation week.
The first group always pays rapt attention. After all, it’s their nickel. The second group is sometimes comprised of individuals who may or may not want to learn. Often, their attentions only peak when topics relate directly to issues they face at work.
As an instructor, your goal is to captivate all of them, to bring them a class in which they will learn and have fun.
To me, this goal is always best achieved through interaction.
As a Microsoft Certified Trainer, and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, I was often called upon to teach the Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) classes. These MOC classes are laid out in detail and they always begin with teacher/student introductions and why everybody is in attendance. As the instructor, you always want to pay close attention to the students’ names and especially why they are attending. Are they self-financed or on a company vacation?
These course introductions begin the class well as everybody participates and is active in the class. However, the MOC then dictates that you need to get through a plethora of PowerPoint slides in a certain amount of time. This often results in the teacher simply reading technical slides as fast as he or she can and quickly losing the interests of the students.
For example, if we are on the first day of the networking class, I tell the students to close their books and then I face the whole class and ask: “So, how do you think networking works?”
Many students then look at you stupefied. “Isn’t that what you are here to teach us?” you can see them thinking.
Then, I will address a student by name and ask: “So, Mary, how do you think computers talk to each other?”
She may respond something to the effect, “I don’t know…a cable.”
“Exactly,” I’ll respond. “Anybody know what this type of cable may be called?”
At this point, several people are already participating, “Ethernet? Cat 5?…”
After one hour has passed in a session like this, with me drawing their ideas on the whiteboard, the class has collectively come up with the fundamentals of computer networking with you steering them in the right direction. Words like physical layer, protocols, Ethernet, and TCP/IP are all now tangible terms that make sense to them.
In this way, the students actively acquire more knowledge than any PowerPoint slide will teach them and they have fun doing it.
This is a question that challenges many technical consulting companies: Should technical project managers be technical? In other words, if you are managing a technology project, do you need to be well-versed in the technologies of the project or do you just need to be a great project manager?
Several years ago, I was working with one of the top technical consulting firms on a large scale network implementation. The firm had heard rumblings that the project was not going well and brought me in to determine if the rumors were in fact true. The company, after speaking with the respected lead project manager, concluded that these murmurs were probably unfounded but they needed to be sure given the large financial numbers involved and the importance of the client.
Though my assignment was with this particular networking project, the first thing that I did was investigate the project management methodologies of this particular consulting company. How did they recruit and train their project managers?
In this particular case, the technical consulting firm structured their employee development into two tiers: the management tier and the technical tier. The project managers received project management training and the technical employees attended technical classes according to the needs of the company.
This gave me an inkling as to what the problems could be, if in fact there were any problems.
Rather than first speak with the project manager, I elected to talk to each of the technical people. These people are the foundation of the project and I needed their perspective. With more than 45 technical personnel being charged out at a substantial daily rate, the project was near budget and due for completion within two weeks.
After speaking with these employees, their collective response was essentially this:
“My part of the project is going fine.” Do you think this project will be completed within the two week timeframe? “Not a chance!”
The rumors of project disarray turned out to be true, alarmingly so. So, what exactly was happening? Where and when did the train go off the tracks?
As sometimes happens in these cases-when a technology project is managed by a non-technical manager-there was nobody overseeing the whole of the technical side of the project.
To be sure, the project began with a solid technology plan. All of the technical personnel had their tasks and objectives to achieve and were doing so. However, no high-level technology roadmap is achieved without significant detours. It is these detours that were causing the unraveling of the project.
While the project manager was checking off the “items completed”, the whole was crumbling and he did not know it. The technical people knew it but did not express it to him for fear of upsetting the project manager.
In the end, we solved the problem by implementing someone to oversee the technical whole but not without significant delays that compromised both the relationship with the client and the budget.
This example is just one of many which begs the question: Should managers of technology projects be technical themselves?
There is no certain answer to this question.
As we see in this case, a technology competent manager would probably have realized that the whole was being compromised and he or she would have made changes to accommodate this. A well-schooled and experienced project manager, with minimal technical awareness, may have been able to come to the same conclusions if he or she had a strong working relationship with those charged with fulfilling the project.
One thing is clear in this matter: Every project needs a technical lead with the ability to ascertain and report the status of a project. If that person is also the project manager (which is often the case on smaller project), that is fine. However, if the project is on a larger scale as this one was, the project requires both a technical project lead and an overall project manager who work in tight conjunction with one another.
Tags: Collective Response, Murmurs, Project Management Methodologies
SEO optimization services can potentially help to improve your website as well as save you time and money. When choosing an SEO company make sure the company has a good reputation as not all SEO companies are reputable and one could end up damaging their website as well as reputation by choosing the wrong SEO Company. Make sure you do your homework and find an SEO who will provide quality services.
A reputable SEO company should provide the following services:
• Firstly they should do a full review of your existing websites structure and content
• There should be technical backup such as hosting, error pages, the use of Java script and redirects
• Development of content
• Management of online development campaigns
• SEO training
• Must have the expertise in specific geographies and market niches
The search result pages should also include search results for Google as advertising with Google won’t have any adverse effect on your websites presence and advertising with Google is free. There are also a host of free resources available such as blogs, webmaster tools, forums of which all can provide you with valuable information on how to optimize your site for a search.
Before searching for an SEO make sure you have some type of consumer knowledge as well as being familiar with search engines as the best places to start is by becoming familiar with the guidelines of the Google webmaster whereby you can learn how Google indexes, serves and crawls the web.
Once you have decided to set up a website you should hire one of the SEO optimization services as soon as possible which can then plan to launch your website or redesign and existing website. Make sure you ask them for a portfolio as well as references and also make sure that the SEO follows the Google webmaster guidelines.
When you go through the guidelines set by the most popular site Google, you will realize that the guidelines are the basics and that if you adhere to the basics, you are able to fulfill all their requirements for being a SEO website. The guidelines have been basically divided into three parts namely, the content and the design guidelines, the technical guidelines and the quality guidelines. It is very necessary that you go through the guidelines so that you come to know the things in SEO that are acceptable and things that are not acceptable to the search engine. Not adhering to these guidelines may cause your website to be penalized and even barred from the Search Engine rankings and results. Let’s have a look at the technical guidelines that have been issued by the search engine to optimize your website so that it is read, recognized, indexed and displayed in the search results.
Some of the technical points that you have to keep in mind for SEO of your website are as follows:
As most of the search engines are Lynx friendly, it is very necessary that you use the text browser like Lynx to examine your own website. This is really important SEO, because if you are unable to see your own website using Lynx, then the search engines who use the similar technology would read your website in the similar way. Lynx is unable to read flashy scripts like the Flash, Java Script, DHTML, frames, session Ids, cookies etc. It is important, for the proper recognition, reading and indexing your website, that all the pages of your website are readable by the search engine crawlers.
You should be able to allow the search bots to crawl your sites without any obstacles like the session IDs or other interactive features that are useful to keep tab on individual user behavior, but blocks the paths of the crawlers. The chances of your site not getting indexed properly increases if there are multiple URLs that look different but are pointers to the same page.
If you have modified your website, then one of the main SEO features that is important is to make sure that your website and server supports the ‘if-modified-since HTTP header’. Having this feature in your web server and website allows the Search bot to know about the modifications you have made, and to index those modifications for search engine results. Also, having this feature saves you the overhead and the bandwidth. You should always make use of the robots.txt file on your web server as this file guides the crawlers to which directories can be searched and which cannot be. You should always keep it updated so as to allow the uninterrupted passage of the crawlers.
The most important part of SEO is to test your website on different search bots to see if it appears in them or not.
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chenshuiyang on September 10th, 2010
In the past, a writer could be called a press officer, a writer of creative writing, true-life or an educational volume writer. In the present day it is diverse as there are a lot of words used to describe a writer particularly those into web content writing. Web content writing is fetching the mainly influential media, new types of web content writing and writers have developed. The following is a short list:
Ghost writing
Technical writing
Travel writing
Business writing
Creative writing
Internet research
Journalistic writing
SEO copywriting
Reviews writing
Academic Writing
News letter writing
Blog Writing
Translation writing
Live chatting
Article writing
A lot of web content writing is being redrafted. Web Content is even now correctly believed to be ruler and specialized rewriters have to tackle the contest of preserving the reliability of the unique text and its significance. This kind of redrafting stresses that the word length and the margins are not distorted. Depending on the customers condition the rewriters have to use their only one of its kind cleverness with language and alter content. They have got to as well be careful and be conscious of global legalities and possible copyright matters.
There are special kinds of articles that are composed for the internet. Fairly repeatedly these articles are redrafted as pages require fresh matter and have to be optimized for the search engines. A number of the ordinary services comprise redrafting of:
PLR (Private Label Rights) articles
E-books
Articles
Manuscript
Press release articles
Web content rewriting
There are a lot of rewards for writing articles. These are for the reason that free article posting websites, can increase your online industry. Advertised articles on websites, they are glanced at by a lot of millions who can be possible business prospects. It can also add to the page rank and the search engine grading arrangement for the website.
Tags: Books Articles, Journalistic Writing, Ruler
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