Contributed by Bruce L. Stegner, Ph.D
My grandmother was from Tennessee and she came fully equipped with the accent and the ability to cook. Sadly, her fried chicken undoubtedly shortened my grandfather’s lifespan. For me, her apple pie was Nirvana on earth. One day I asked her how she learned to bake pie and she told me that when she was a little girl, they had a cook who taught her. When the pie was ready to be baked, the cook told my grandmother to have the oven preheated, then open the oven door and put her hand in the oven until it felt “Just so.” That meant the oven was ready and the pie could go in the oven to be baked.
Years later I realized that this was an imprecise training method that worked and wondered how we could train people to use SAS with a similar model. The best I came up with was asking a mentor for a piece of working code that I could then modify. That let me focus on the portions of SAS that mattered and let the rest take care of itself.
But different people learn better with different approaches. Business demands can influence what a business can tolerate in terms of releasing valuable people for training time. In addition, advances in technology and infrastructure have opened whole new doorways to training. When I started trying to learn all of this in the 60’s there was a sign over the consultant’s window which said “Read the manual.” So I did. Some others approaches for getting help or training are:
- Ask the person sitting next to you. This is almost always the preferred method. Advantages: you can work together to formulate the question. Often the answer is easy once you know the right way to ask the question. Disadvantages: it takes time from two workers.
- Call someone you know.
- Attend a class. This is a terrific way to learn, if your company can afford it and afford for you to be gone. Advantages: The material is usually presented in an orderly way, you learn things that you are too ignorant to know enough to ask about and you are exposed to the documentation. Disadvantages: This approach is resource consumption intense. Training, housing, transportation and lost work are all prices your company has to pay. If you don’t have the prerequisites, the class could be a waste of time. Also, after the class, if you can’t work with what you learned, your new knowledge could easily fade.
- Have an on-site class for a group of people. This is an excellent approach if you have a major shift coming and you have many people who need to learn the same thing. Advantages: Everyone learns a common tongue, has a shared experience, and starts with a common knowledge base. You can also learn on your own data. Disadvantages: Costs can be very high and a computer classroom may be necessary.
- The desktop Webinar. I confess my comments come almost exclusively from experience with the SAS approach. This method is when a person uses their desktop computer to connect to an instructor-led, structured, and interactive online course. The SAS webinars that we’ve attended lasted half a day over a number of days. Advantages: No travel, lodging or extended absence from work. The student can still work half the day. In a couple of cases people would come to me with observations on how to do things better, ask how what we did fit into the model they were learning or just ask questions. The cycle of learning was clearly accelerated with this approach. I was also pleasantly surprised at how much the students liked this approach and would request desktop training with a live instructor as opposed to going to San Francisco to learn macros and crab.
There are probably other approaches which have value as well (please post your thoughts here). As a manager, you should know your people and have a sense of what environments would be best for them Matching the student to the method in the context of environmental constraints is one way you can shine in the eyes of the people who report to you, as well as those who monitor your work.
In the absence of impediments or technology, today I would probably recommend the desktop based Webinar. The only thingI can’t see getting with this approach would be knowing when the oven is “just so.” And the smell of apples, nutmeg and cinnamon.
