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Showing posts from November, 2018

Talking Shop

It can be tempting to confuse training with learning, with skill acquisition, or with the ability to recognise situations in which training material could be used. Attending a workshop is, in general, unlikely to make you an expert in a thing, equip you to apply the thing in your real world context, or even necessarily make you aware that the thing could be applied. Attendees would do well to remember it (particularly when sending me a CV!) and their managers would do even better. I'm an attendee and a manager: do I do better? I hope so. In the test team at Linguamatics we spend our training budget on the same kinds of things that your teams probably do: books, conferences, courses, subscriptions, workshops and occasionally something different like an internal conference or escape room. Crucially, as both manager and attendee, I try hard not to mistake having and doing for knowing and being confident in practice. It's important to me, as a manager, to participate in tr