The document discusses issues with traditional corporate training approaches and proposes solutions. It notes that traditional training often provides an "information dump" without proper context or understanding of business needs, and that training requirements are not adequately linked to actual business problems. It also discusses challenges of the growing scope and specialization of technologies, and the need for training professionals to understand more technical domains while engaging a distributed workforce. Solutions proposed include tools to help training professionals locate expertise and enable collaboration across a distributed workforce through virtual environments and web 2.0 technologies.

1. Training – The Corporate Perspective

2. The Goal … The goal of any training is to enable people who are delivering work to be skilled to a level of proficiency in the work they are delivering, which can bring out the desired level of output, both qualitatively, and quantitatively. Is this happening?

3. What we see today Inadequate skills Skills mismatch Inadequate training Improper perspectives

4. How Training has evolved … Guru-Shishya (took years; holistic, life-learning) Apprentice (took months; thorough in one area) Training (takes days; information dump)

5. What trainees get Information dump Little or no context building No understanding of bigger picture Far less than thorough understanding

6. Training approach Hurried trainings Throw a training at the problem, and the problem will go away Have to spend the budget, so need to do trainings Keyword search in catalogue to identify training needs

7. The Issue … Not much understanding of the business problem. Training requirement Business problem No step before the TNA

8. An Example … A developer is having trouble understanding what the client is saying … Send him to training on Communications Skills. Maybe the problem is that he doesn’t understand the business perspective of the technology?

9. Adding to this … The long tail of training … More and more people need more and more trainings in more and more niches or technologies.  Training professionals need to understand more and more about more and more niches or technologies.

10. Adding to the tail … Too many technologies Distributed workforce Lack of post-training engagement

11. Some solutions … Expertise location as a tool to be available to training professionals Virtual worlds to enable the organization to reach a distributed workforce engaged in different niches Collaboration/web 2.0 tools to enable collaboration, to generate post-training engagement