On training vines and users
I am an amateur gardener in my not-so-copious spare time, and this year I am attempting to train wisteria and honeysuckle vines onto some cords I have strung around the garden. This involves going out to all of the vines several times a week and gently moving the new growth towards the cord you want them to grow on, as well as pruning growth that just isn’t headed in the right direction.
Meanwhile, at my day job, we are having trouble filling a slot because we lack people with the proper certifications - a direct consequence in management decisions to focus solely on revenue with little to no investment in useful training. Training a workforce is like training a vine - it’s an ongoing process, it has to be maintained for the more senior employees / older vines just like the entry level / new shoots.
Also meanwhile, another client - a business with over a hundred thousand employees and as many additional contractors, is asking their workforce to get trained on regulatory compliance, by having us sign up and watch webcasts. This kind of approach is done with the hope that the people who actually need to comply with the regulations get the information they need, but I’m not sure it’s more cost-effective than targeting the training at those that need it.
Since I’ve been thinking about usability problems, especially where it relates to security engineering, I can carry the metaphor a step further. Administrators, employees, and customers are all users, and a system of any complexity requires all of those users to have decent initial training (introduction to the system), ongoing training (in the form of easy to navigate, complete and comprehensive documentation), an approachable technical support mechanism, and a mechanism for entering trouble tickets and/or bug reports.
And, um, that’s like training vines. Blah, the metaphor slipped away.