The Value of Training

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, Dave. We find ourselves here again.

Peter, good to hear you again. It's uh kind of nice to be able to catch up on a regular basis, even though we can't meet for the obligatory coffee or beer, um, the current situation.

Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to being able to sit down and hang a pint with you again at some point. It'll be uh very enjoyable. So what's on the cards for today?

Well, I I I think this is uh about time that we started approaching this one. So as a certified Scrum trainer, obviously, I do a lot of training. Uh I believe you have now joined the the ranks of certified trainerhood as well. So maybe just give us a bit of background as to that side of things.

Yes, yes. I'm now a registered education provider for the DevOps Institute. So I can give all sorts of wonderful DevOps training. And uh uh we've got a couple of clients we're lining up to do exactly that with. Uh so yeah, I'm I'm starting to enter those ranks. That's definitely true.

Yeah. And I think training is an interesting uh beast because lots of there's a lot of misunderstanding, I think, around training and around the value of training, certified training, non-certified training, and what the differences are. So maybe just to explore a little bit more about um being a rep for the DevOps Institute, what sort of trainings do you offer? Are they certified? And what would you say the benefits are from your perspective?

So there's seven courses at the moment, and they're spinning up an eighth, uh, all in a variety of fields from DevOps Foundation, DevSecOps, continuous delivery, uh, and including some Agile Service Manager ones, uh, which is kind of interesting too, because it kind of bridges the uh gap across two different uh areas there. Uh and there's I would there are definitely certifications attached to all of them, uh, and the you can go through the course. Each course is two days and uh or 16 hours worth of material, roughly, and you go through the education process and the it's fairly experimental learning, so that you could start to learn a little bit about these topics and then take them away and start applying them to your work.

So maybe to start with, why what makes you and your company's um training different to any other reps in the field? What would you say makes your training stand out?

Well, this is an interesting question, isn't it? So I would say that because we're showing up as very experienced trainers with lots and lots of background knowledge from lots of different related fields, there's lots of that experience that we can then bring to uh the training sessions and the conversation. So when people bring up other topics or related topics or different angles or perspectives, uh we can answer those questions immediately then in there in the moment, which uh adds a lot of value for the uh the attendees and the students. Uh there's also a the deep understanding of the subject matter, of course, is um is key. Uh and uh one of the things that uh we like to do with all of our training um that we run, which isn't a whole lot, but uh lot of when we do like to run training, we make it very interactive, very experimental, very much a case of you you learn by doing, uh and you learn by applying this to problems and uh and working in in small groups to be able to take and apply the uh subject matter to real problems.

Yeah, it's interesting you say that. So I have um uh three children who are all going through the online university experience right now, and um, both in talking to each of the three about the experiences they have through education and also observing some of those experiences when I'm over here in lectures and things like this, I think there's uh it's really important to recognize that learning or education training is a combination of a number of things and um and quality or that experience in the training is a very, very important part. Uh just uh if I think back, so I've been a certified Scrum trainer now since 2013. I've trained thousands of people on any number of different uh certified trainings, so Scrum Alliance type of training, certified Scrum Masters right up to certified agile leadership and certified agile uh leadership part two, which is the sort of you know top level, if you like, in terms of uh leadership training within the Scrum Alliance. And the three things that strike me around education that that come together and they're like one-third each, if you like, which you're touching on, one of those is expertise. And I think the if you're not still gaining expertise as a trainer or an educator, then automatically your material is becoming, you know, is is degrading over time, because that expertise, that practical, pragmatic application in the real world is a very important piece. Um, and another bit that comes in is relevance and relevance of the material. So you're describing, for example, a number of those different trainings and selecting which training to go in has a lot to do with the relevance to my role, and we can talk a bit about that in a second. But there's the third bit, which is the quality of the training, the engagement generated uh within that training or education piece. And I think this is the bit I just was kind of honing in on because, especially with the move to virtual training, I think there are examples of virtual training which are dire, which are a poor experience. And we're all familiar with the video playing in the background while we're checking our emails, keeping up to date with whatever game we're playing, or just browsing the internet while this talking voice is going on in the background. And in a virtual environment, we need to spend so much more time on the quality of the training and how that training happens.

I think that's a very, very good point.

Do you add anything to that? Sorry.

No, I uh I think that's a very good point. I think uh there's we we sometimes forget, even uh as trainers, when you're starting to engage in that um in the online setting, uh how you engage with the person at the other end of the line is very different, too. You need to be much more expressive, you need to be much more uh in the moment, you need to be uh looking for uh how people are engaging, are they distracted and uh are there other things going on? Because there will be, and that's uh it could be very difficult to uh set the right norms within the training so that uh people are deeply engaged, they've got work to do, and they're not just listening to a talking head. Because if they're listening to a talking head and there's notifications popping up with emails from work saying, hey, pay attention to this, pay attention to this, this needs fixing, this needs I need help with this, help, help, help. And they're not going to be focused on what it is that you're trying to convey or the or the complex problems or whatever it is that uh is involved in the training.

Absolutely, absolutely. And and what I find, I'm certainly my experience in shifting from an in-person classroom setting to a virtual setting is my initial expectations were um caution because of the different environment. What I've actually found is where the experience can be pretty much as good as an in-person setting. I get that the in-person classroom has some real benefits which are not there in a virtual setting, but the learning experience can really be as rich, uh, in fact, in some cases, richer than you can get in in the in-person classroom setting. So uh I think that's it's on the it's on the trainer or the educator to make sure that that is happening and there are tools out there that allow it to happen. But certainly the feedback that I see consistently from people going through virtual trainings is the the comfort level and the sort of um uh I wanted to say surprise. It's not really surprise, but the the reaction to the training is very, very positive because they're in an environment where they really can engage and they can kind of get lots of learning coming out of that training uh in those situations. Maybe if I just follow up a little bit on that and let's just talk about the value of training. Should people take training? What's the value of it? And maybe, Peter, can you throw in a bit about certification, especially as you dip your toes into that world of certification? What do you see as the value of training or the value of certification?

So the so the value of training is for me largely that filling of the information gaps, a way to find the knowledge that we don't have and take and and work out how I can take that information, how can I apply it. Here's something new that I didn't know before. Maybe this this piece of knowledge, these nuggets of things that I can take now that I've learned them and apply them to what I'm doing and get value from it. So training is um or can be a very, very good way when it's done well of getting a lot of information very quickly, uh, in a way that you're able to ask questions to uh understand more the material far more deeply than uh you might necessarily be able to do if you're just going to uh absorb it from um yeah, well, watching a video on a talking head.

Uh so if you that so sorry to to interrupt, but that sounds like it's an accelerator. What I'm hearing you saying is I can go read a book or I can learn it through practice, but I can accelerate my my kind of journey along that experience curve by getting an education from uh a certified body, for example, but anybody who has the experience and the ability to be able to communicate and speed up our understanding of the topic.

Exactly. Yes. It's uh it's accelerator, it helps us uh get there faster. And in terms of certifications, so certifications uh the for me the real value in certifications is the the social proof that they provide. The the fact that having the social the um the certification as that social proof is something that we can use to uh understand is this person uh do they have the right skills? Uh can I say that I know they're at least as good as they had to be to get that certification. Um so that means that it it can act as that form of social proof. There's I'm not a a huge fan of certifications in a in a lot of cases, but that's where I see it having having value in the in the marketplace. Uh we know that somebody who has uh that has passed a certain certification, like a Scrum Master, has at least gone through uh a certain amount of learning. It doesn't necessarily mean that they've uh really achieved all of the things that they can from that, and there's a lot more that we would expect to know. And we would ask questions if we're interviewing them to find out like just how good is their knowledge, but it at least gives us some comfort level that they have uh the basics that they would have got from that training. Is there anything you'd add to that?

Yeah, I I've always uh struggled a bit with the kind of um the pushback on things like certification because all of us went through school and then many of us have gone on to university and we get certificates, we get degrees and whatever else it might be, and and high school diplomas and so on. So uh and we understand that these kind of reflect a couple of things. One of them is they reflect, you know, where you are in terms of that journey of experience. And that can be I've done a two-day class on something, and so I at least understand the terminology and a little bit about the philosophy behind it, for example, or it can be I've got a four or five-year degree, and you better consider me one of the foremost experts in this particular field, whatever that field is. So there's a there's a rating, if you like, or an understanding of exactly how much experience that we have. But then there's another side to it, which is the signaling aspect. And this is, you know, for the people who they choose their university because of what the university confers on them as well, right? And the signaling side comes from uh, and and you and I've both interviewed many people for different roles, and you you we see resumes where there are many, many certificates, and that certification kind of there's a it's almost like a certification junkie. They pull lots and lots of certificates in, and they're signaling, right? They're signaling their intent to learn, they're signaling a number of different things. We can read into it what we will, but it's a signaling tool. And uh so I think there's there's benefits there from the signaling perspective. There's benefits there from the I no longer have to describe to you what experience I have. Um there's also the other benefit that I often see around certification is uh as a perk from an HR slash company perspective. Um, there's a lot of us who've worked in large organizations where one of the benefits of a large organization is they will spend the extra $100, $200, the difference between certification and non-certification as a benefit to their employees to kind of as part of that whole benefits package that we get that allows us to say this is a value of working here, is one of those is they take education seriously. And we can follow in some sort of a certification path.

Yeah, for sure. And I think that's a that second one, especially is a very good one too. It's the that signaling the that hey, we at least have this. We're and we've got now a common understanding and a c of the language we can talk so that we understand that if I hire you, I I can at least uh know that based on the certifications you have, this means that you now should know the language I'm talking, you should understand what I mean when I talk about things like sprints and scrum and all the rest of it. Um there's there's definitely value in that. Um and we do as human beings tend to place uh higher value in certain in education from certain places as well. Um so if uh you look at like your Oxford or Cambridges of this world, or I I went to Harvard type thing, and uh I have a certificate. I personally have a certificate from Stanford, which I like to tell people about too.

Although what is that certificate in? I'm interested in that.

It's in uh machine learning. So there you go. Yeah, it's um because and and that was because I was just uh I was a topic I was interested in, um, and I and I was a particular there was a particular problem I wanted to solve, so I decided I I simply don't know enough about it. And the the reason was I needed to know uh how to do um how to turn text into a recommendation engine, how to do that conversion. I had no idea. So I went and learned this machine learning certificate, which taught me a whole ton of things I didn't need to know, but it was a lot of background information to get me to the thing I did want to know, um, which uh was interesting. So now I have a certificate from Stanford, which I can say.

And that's a great little story, just that in a nutshell encapsulates the value of training, if you like. You know, you've got the relevance there, you needed a that you had a specific problem to solve. The quality is signalled, of course, by the uh the certification itself and the expertise that they have in that field. Maybe just in closing, we've got a few minutes left. But um, Peter, what are your thoughts? Like, when is education or training not the answer? What's the opposite side of that?

So it's it's never the place that I would start really. I would start by looking at uh what are the problems we're looking to solve, um, what are the outcomes that we're looking for? Uh because if you if you start by learning a whole ton of the information that is not going to be relevant to the to solving what you're trying to do, and we see organizations do this all the time, um where they they invest tons of money and and time into training, which they then don't uh they then don't do the pieces that are necessary to follow up, or it's the wrong training, or it's the wrong type of information to get them to where they need to get to, or it's at the wrong moment in time that this might even be the right training, but this isn't the time that they need to learn it, um, because they're not going to be able to immediately apply the information that they're now going to have. So so those are kind of the times when I I feel that uh training doesn't necessarily fit the bill. Um are there anything is there anything you would add to that?

Well, it's interesting that you say that, because I think there are times when we're going to do training, some education, and we we come out of the other end to go, well, not as useful as I was hoping. So I'm not sure that that timing aspect is quite there from a general I I'm curious about the world around me, right? So so if I take a training on whatever it might be, or some education on an aspect of DevOps, but I'm not necessarily going to apply it, but it opens my mind a little bit and allows me to have a broader base foundation on which to make decisions, have conversations, and so on. I think there's value in that. I think what I'd like to pull out, though, is the idea that that you only need training. That we can look at a problem and we can go, okay, we want to do X, whatever X might be, train everybody up, and then we're done. And it I think training is is one piece, and it's an important one, an accelerator. We talked about that earlier. It's an accelerator that moves people along their journey quicker. But to your point, if I can't then go and apply it, that accelerator's lost because you know it's it's there. I've got a few connections in my brain about how to use it, but I'm not necessarily going into that next step of application and learning through application. And so that ability to entrench that learning because I take it to the workplace and I apply it and it's relevant and I get better as a you know part of a team, whatever it is, I think becomes really important.

I think those are I think those are very, very good points. Is there anything you'd like to uh add as we uh wrap this up today?

Well, maybe so as I said, I've been I'm a a lifelong learner, and I have, as you have, you know, these rubber stamps from various signaling universities and and authorities, if you like. I'm a big fan of continual learning. Uh I think the reason I spend so much time on the education side is uh I I see the value so rich you know very clearly, and we've talked about it as an accelerator, as a signaling tool and various other things around that, as that sort of relevance piece. But I also think the real important thing around training is that focus on quality. And I think too many times people don't focus on the quality side, and a a training where it is a talking head, where it's just not um not designed from the people taking that training's perspective to maximize understanding, maximize retention is a real lost opportunity. And I think that's one of the things that maybe people don't always talk about when they're looking at selecting training providers. So, for example, when I hear that you're uh a rep within the DevOps space, I know what that means in terms of the quality that you bring to the table because I know how you approach these sorts of problems. So that's something that I I absolutely kind of back up in the sense that you know you're going to be you bring the the quality in terms of presentation and engagement as well as that expertise. And so if it's relevant, then people should take your training because they're gonna get something out of it.

Well, thank you for that. I I think they will too. I'm looking forward to it. And and uh and with that, I think uh we can we can wrap up for today. So thank you very much, Dave.

Uh thanks again, Peter. Look forward to the next conversation.

Me too. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.