Technical Writer

Some general observations on training courses, companies that provide them, the trainers and the training documentation.

I recently attended a two-day course on creating Crystal Reports.

This program has been around a long time now and according to our trainer hasn’t really changed much over the years except that some things that used to come as part of the standard package are now sold as add-ons.

The trainer

The trainer was good. She had been a trainer for 13 years and she knew her Crystal Reports. She kept a good eye on all the students, not losing the slower ones but keeping the pace so that the ones who caught on faster (or who’d had prior experience with the software) didn’t get bored.

We thought she was good—until the very last question on the second day.

She was showing us how to get report for a date range, and then put the date range into the header. But the date range she put into the header was the first and last date of the data returned, not for the parameters we had requested. For example, if we requested data from 1 May to 31 May, but there were only five records and they were all for the 14 May, then the header put in data requested for 14 May to 14 May, while we wanted it to show 1 May to 31 May.

It wasn’t so much the question—we know that you can do it—it was more her answer. “But why would you even want to?â€? that stunned us. We spent five minutes trying to explain to her why someone would want to know more than just what dates were in the report. Why it was just as important to know that there were no results for the other days as it was to know there were results for the 14th.

I know that if people my workplace got a report like that (with just the dates returned in the heading), they would assume the report was wrong, keep trying to run it for the full month, and finally get frustrated and report it as a bug.

It changed our perception of the trainer from someone who knew what she was talking about to someone who knew the theory but had no idea of what was happening in the real world.

I know it was harsh. She was still a good trainer.

For me it emphasised how much authority you lose when people suddenly feel you have no idea what you are talking about.

The documentation

The documentation wasn’t bad, but it was old.

We weren’t learning the latest version, we were learning to use what we had at work, and I imagine that few people are writing for this particular version any more. The training workbook looked like something that was written ten years ago. It used examples dated 2002.

It was photocopied—rather poorly—and images were hard to see.

Talking to the trainer she mentioned that each workbook costs them $70. I think it was partly a license fee and partly a printing fee. $70 seemed high, particularly for such a poor quality reproduction. Because it was an old version, I imagine the documentation company could charge what they wanted, because there would be little demand for it.

Training and the recession

The recession has hit training companies hard. At one break we discussed how many training companies had closed their doors in the last six months. This company, which had expanded just prior to the crash, had empty training rooms everywhere.

I can definitely say that at our work the training budget was the first to go when we began cutting costs.

Contractors were the second.

For tech writers everywhere that has to be bad news.