Michael Lubenski has served in many positions here at Caliber – but his most recent move to the “Senior Learning Coordinator” spot is not entirely new to him; in fact, Michael got his start here at Caliber as one of our CAD Trainers. We sat down with Michael to learn more about his experience providing outstanding training experiences to our customers throughout the years and get his advice on planning and conducting memorable training sessions.
Why is training so important?
When an employee undergoes training, it improves their skills and knowledge of their job. It helps them understand the work that is required of them, but it also helps them understand the work that is required of others on their team. This builds their confidence up and can increase their sense of belonging. When employees are knowledgeable and feel confident, that can reduce the amount of time that managers need to spend closely supervising their employees.
Training will also boost morale; it’s proof to your employees that you are invested in their growth. I think that’s probably the most powerful impact.
Are there any tools you find especially helpful / like to use in your training courses?
Anyone who knows me knows that I love Microsoft – so anything they put out there, you know I am going to use and love.
I use OneNote a lot when creating a course syllabus and for drafting out a script for our on-demand video courses. I also use PowerPoint for presentations.
There are a lot of tools out there that you can use if you want to incorporate video – we have a number of customers who have told us that they use WebEx or Teams to host a meeting with just themselves where they share and record their screen as they work on the CAD or RMS application, then they upload the recording to a location on their network, email a link to the video to their staff and that works just fine for their needs. When I first started creating video training sessions, I used software that came with my GoPro camera, and that worked ok for what I needed at the time, but since then, I have upgraded my video creation tool. I would say there are lots of tools that can be used it just depends on the scale of your training/project.
For Caliber University, we use paid video editing tools that allow us to zoom in, crop, outline different things on the screen in an easier way which is good given the number of videos we are pushing out there.
What should people avoid when planning training sessions?
Trying to do it all by yourself. There is a lot that goes into training, from analyzing what you need, deciding goals and objectives, and creating agendas and class materials. There’s a lot of ground to cover. It always helps to get other perspectives as you work through the process.
Another benefit of including other people in your planning and material creation phases is that they may be aware of information or materials that already exist within your organization that you could repurpose or refresh for the course. And finally, when you think you are ready to train, running through your plan with a colleague can help identify areas that may still need work.
