You’ll often want to replicate an effect you saw on YouTube. Not so with heavy-duty video and media creation tools such as Camtasia Studio. Writing a letter doesn’t generally require a detailed set of best practices for efficient workflow. Often, they’re barely one chapter ahead of their students.įor some courses, like Introduction to Word, this is okay, because if you teach that x button performs y action, most students can assimilate that information and apply it to their own ends. The person at the podium isn’t always an expert in the subject matter. It may surprise you, but this is generally accepted practice in a great number of training firms. I pull out our VBA instruction manual, and work through the book’s exercises so that I’m ready to lead a classroom full of learners through the very same exercises, the very next day.

Say I suddenly find I’m teaching Visual Basic for Applications the following day, and I don’t have a clue what VBA is about or why it’s even useful. One necessary part of the job was taking an occasional “development day” to prepare for a class you’d never taught before. As a Microsoft-certified training partner, we mostly handled standard office fare, stuff like showing clerical staff the basics of how to compute data in Excel, or giving little old grannies their first introduction to Windows so that they could finally exchange e-mails with the grandkids.

My first job out of grad school was with a small technical training firm in Okemos, Michigan. What’s the #1 problem with training courses for media creation tools like Camtasia? Answer: Instruction that isn’t based on real-world use.

Camtasia training video