Training is not the only profession where you need to remain up to date with new changes, theories, strategies and of course technology. I think that would apply to all professions but I often think that trainers, teachers and educators may well be the worst at keeping current, up to date and informed on what is happening just up the road. This thought occurred to me last night when I was answering a question on another blog from a keen trainer who wanted to now how to improve their skills. I immediately jumped into the technology solutions to keeping up to date, of which there are many. As he quite rightly pointed out he also wanted the face to face options to this as well. I agree, but for many of us who travel a lot, spend a great deal of time training others, don’t live in areas where groups and networks essentially exist and live busy lives outside of work then the face to face options are limited. What I do appreciate is that this person was asking for options and help. many trainers that I run into are so caught up in training others that they forget that they also need to learn and develop. I intend to do a little bit of research on this over the next few weeks and report on it in my new video series coming up called Ask Logicool. I am also going to make a point of blogging good contacts, networks and groups as I come across them. I want to mention a couple today.
1. If you are not using a RSS feed reader and subscribing to content the you are missing a truck load of great information that comes to you. You don’t need to seek it out. I use Google Reader (Google it) but there are many others if you are not into Google products. The key tips with using a reader is to dedicate a time of the day when you spend say 30 minutes reading through the list and picking out the articles you want to spend more time with. The obvious reaction to that statement is where am I going to find the time? Answer, I don’t read the paper anymore as you can also get the news using RSS and hence I spend that 30 minutes or so reading exactly what I asked for and not a whole lot of rubbish, including endless advertising.
2. Google Alerts. This is a relatively new one for me and I hope to set up a short instructional video soon to show how this works. I ignored this for a long time thinking it wouldn’t be useful but it is great. Quite simply you must have a google account and then you can use Google Alerts. Once you turn it on it allows you to put in a search term like “Training” and it will send an up date to you every time somebody includes the word training anywhere on the Internet in anything that they post in a blog, web page etc. It can email this information to you if you like but I find that a bit painful. The best option I found was to send it to my RSS reader and then I could scan through them occasionally. If you used just the word “Training” you are going to get a lot of rubbish (sport, dogs etc) so try out more complex search strings and what you will get is some real gems.
3. This is just one example of good information that can be found on the Internet. The Learning Solutions magazine. You can subscribe via RSS or email. It is targeting e learning but if that is what you are into what a great source of current information.
There are many other sources of current and future information out there. Lets compile a list of sources, networks, feeds, groups and yes, face to face type meetings. Send them into me using the comment section or my other page Ask Logicool and I will create another page that will list them. I am going to do my bit. How about giving me a hand.
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