(January 24, 2003) - What are the shortcomings of traditional developer training, and how can it be improved? For answers, JDJ editor-in-chief Alan Williamson recently spoke with Partha Nageswaran, lead technical architect and founder of Trans-World Resources, the New Jersey-based J2EE consulting and education services company. Partha is the author of "Conquer-IT! - J2EE Part 1: JSPs and Servlets," a powerful Computer Based Training tool.
JDJ: TW Resources provide a unique training program aimed specifically at J2EE developers. What was it about the existing training techniques that you felt you could improve on?
Partha: Traditional instructor-led training continues to be one of the more effective ways of imparting J2EE knowledge. Yet this technique has inherent limitations including:
Most importantly, the lack of use of powerful visualization tools to illustrate concepts.
The biggest shortcoming is that not enough (if any) emphasis is placed on visualization of concepts.
Most ILTs leverage the standard Presentation, discussion, chalk talk and lab session format. They ignore powerful animations that may be used to illustrate concepts that an instructor talks about.
Visualization of concepts through animations enhances the learning experience significantly, thus laying a strong foundation upon which further learning can be built. In addition it can reduce learning times significantly.
The quality of the offering is heavily dependent on the expertise of the instructor, her/his ability to communicate complex concepts in an easy-to-understand manner and the ability to grab the attendees' attention for several days.
Not enough instructors have serious developmental experience in enterprise technologies such as J2EE, which they teach. Many instructors learn the technology top-down and teach it.
Presentation skills being the same, there is a marked difference between offerings from a person who has learned the technology top-down than one who has significant real-world experience. For a learner this difference may not be perceivable at the time of the training. The difference typically rears its head during project development times.
There is no significant reference material provided by the training company, which recaps the concepts and programming techniques learned in the course.
Most courses leave the attendee with printouts of the presentations, some lab solutions and not much else. In a short while, the context associated with these presentations are lost, rendering them worthless in most cases
The cost of Instructor Led Training (ILT) tends to be prohibitively high.
v For the most part, training companies have been able to charge and get very high rates, primarily because companies have had to quickly ramp up developer's skills to meet project deadlines.
Employers having to send employees away from work for weeks (at least 1-3 at a time).
In many ways, the time away from work is unavoidable - One needs to invest time to learn newer technologies, particularly the fast-evolving ones. However, the amount of time spent is much more that needed, primarily because of the non-inclusion of powerful animations into an ILT curriculum.
