Education
When there’s a freeloader on your team
According to extensive research The Gallup Organization (Washington D.C.) and Harvard Business Review have conducted over the past decade, few factors are as corrosive to employee engagement as a colleague who skates through the workweek taking advantage of the much harder work of others. What’s the cost of disengagement? Much more than any manager wants [...]
Boomers at the exit gates
Organizations across the globe are trying to come to grips with a new corporate challenge; one created by millions of employees who make up the boomer generation, who are poised to leave the working world, for golf, sailing, gardening or playing with the grandkids. In some cases the departure of these senior employees will allow [...]
Bad employees rarely quit and good ones are hard to find
Finding great employees is really hard. I don’t mean it’s difficult — I mean it’s virtually impossible to succeed in hiring great employees all the time. It’s equally hard to keep them, as it turns out. As Don Rainey recently wrote: Good employees are really hard to find — A solid worker isn’t just difficult to find, [...]
It’s never a good time for training
As Jamin Arvig, President of WaterFilters.net learned the hard way, putting off training has a cost of its own: Lost employees. As Jarmin wrote in his A Worker Quit — Because I Didn’t Train Him To Succeed, if you don’t arm your employees to succeed they’ll eventually go elsewhere to look for career advancement. “[It] [...]
Fix your boss (or, reduce risk to quality using a matrix approach)
How do you ensure that one person doesn’t derail your entire project? Most of us have been there before. Maybe it’s a co-worker who doesn’t work well with the team. Maybe it’s your boss, who has to oversee every single decision even though he’s an overtasked bottleneck. Either problem poses a critical risk to your project: Delays, mistakes and rework because one person isn’t part of a streamlined effort. Learn how the situation can be improved, realizing positive gains in this habitually entrenched process.
Should Training be an Integral Part of a Project Budget to Increase Project Profitability?
Organizations that are “training challenged” must learn to do things differently. This includes delegating authority along with responsibility, being inspirational to employees, building trust and improving communication — all of which are direct benefits of a comprehensive process that incorporates training. Take a look at part two of Should Training be an Integral Part of [...]
What do you mean, SQA isn’t testing?
Software Quality Assurance (SQA) and Structured Software Testing (SST) are completely different fields. Every single book on the topic (textbooks, course materials, you name it) make this clear. In fact, most emphasize how important it is that these fields be completely separate. Consider: Quality Assurance is responsible for auditing and ensuring all aspects of work [...]
Articulating the value of training
Training budgets are one of the first to go in a down economy. I first pointed this out in Finding Strategic Learning Funds, but there’s ample evidence to be gathered. When the money isn’t there, organizations start casting about for any program they deem expendable. But the unfortunate truth is that training is the best [...]
Finding strategic learning funds
Training Industry Times recently published some rather disappointing statistics: Over 92% of surveyed business have experienced pressure to reduce their training budget in 2007. Worse, 56% reported that the pressure to reduce or altogether cut training costs were “significant.” Is this attitude regarding education part-and-parcel of the declining attitude toward education in the United States? [...]
The case for certification
I had to read the Agile Alliance’s position on certification a few times before I could decide whether I liked their position or not. Part of this is that the opinion is not that well written. Getting past that, I came away with these core statements: Employers should not require certification. Non-skill-based certification testing procedures [...]
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