Elevate Your Training Career Charting your training career outside the newsroom Wherever you are as a trainer and wherever you want to go, you can elevate your career by working on personal development. This conference, the Newscoach (http://talk.poynter.org/newscoach/) list, the No Train, No Gain web site, colleagues and other training programs will help you move to a higher level, but nothing will help as much as your own commitment to improvement. As training consultant Alan Weiss noted in API’s “Train the Trainer” program, if you can improve by just 1 percent each day, you will be twice as good in 70 days. Set goals. Where do you want your career to take you?Perhaps you want to leave your current position and chase your dream job. Perhaps you want to grow a part-time training role at your current newsroom into a full-time position, or close to it. Maybe you want to move from a newsroom to an organization that works exclusively or heavily in training, such as Poynter, API or IRE. Maybe you’re open to any of those possibilities and more. Clarify your ambitions, at least in your own mind, and decide what steps might move you toward a goal. Even if you’re flexible about the paths you might take, consider where you’d like to be in a year or two or five. Opportunities or changed interests might take you in different directions, but you will always benefit from setting and pursuing goals. Determine what it takes. Look at the others who are where you want to go. What skills do they have? What experiences do they have? What personal characteristics do they have? What connections do they have? What skills, experiences or personal characteristics might make you as good as they are or better? What connections will help you get the opportunities they had? Make a plan. Decide what you can do to develop the skills, experiences, personal characteristics and connections you will need to pursue your goals. Pursue opportunities. Ask your editors to send you to events that will help you grow. If they won’t send you, investigate fellowship possibilities. See whether your parent company would support your costs for the program. Take responsibility for your own growth. Ideally, your bosses will pay some or all of the costs of conferences, seminars or university courses that will help you grow. If they don’t, you still need to grow. Invest the time or money it takes to grow into the kind of trainer you want to be. Improve your skills Assess whether you have the skills you need to teach. Our industry is making new demands of reporters, editors, visual journalists, web specialists and other newsroom staffers all the time. Make sure your skills are up to date, so you are teaching the skills your newsroom needs tomorrow, not the skills it needed yesterday. Develop your digital skills. We’ve talked a lot at this conference about digital training. The more you develop your own digital skills, the more valuable you will be to your newsroom and to potential clients outside your newsroom. Arrange to spend a couple weeks or months working, at least part-time, with your interactive staff. Shoot, edit and post some multimedia stories and some interactive maps. Get your feet wet with video, audio, slide shows, blogs and polls. Develop and post a searchable online database. Learn how easy and difficult digital journalism can be. Try some moblogging. Cover a breaking story, where you learn the skills of writing repeated brief updates for the web. Write some e-mail or text-message alerts. Learn how to use and set up RSS feeds. Develop your own personal web site. Write a blog about training issues on your newsroom intranet. You don’t have to be proficient at everything, but you need to be familiar with lots of things. A trainer without strong digital skills is an outdated trainer. A trainer who can at least address the digital aspects of various topics and skills he teaches is going to be a trainer in great demand. Develop your data analysis skills. How strong are your computer-assisted reporting skills? Have you stopped after learning a few basics, such as Internet searching and simple spreadsheets? Have you even mastered those basics? Learn a new program or a new way to use the programs you’re using. As you coach reporters in stories, ask each time what data sources might help tell the story. Learn what reporters need to know to obtain and analyze the data. If you’ve passed on learning many computer skills, it’s time you moved into the 21 st Century. A reporter isn’t a complete reporter today if she doesn’t know how to access and analyze data and a trainer isn’t a complete trainer if she doesn’t include data analysis in what she teaches. Databases aren’t just a reporting tool now. Your reporters also need to be able to work with digital journalists in presenting searchable databases online. So trainers who can teach those concepts and skills to reporters become more valuable trainers. Think visually. Newsrooms don’t just want you to train staff members in reporting, writing and editing today. Even if you aren’t a specialist in design, photography or graphics, you need to be able to teach layering and teach the word-oriented journalists how to plan and coordinate their stories with the art, photo and design departments. Whatever your background, your training needs to bridge the newsroom silos and teach colleagues how to think broadly and work together. Master numbers. Lots of journalists hate math and aren’t very good at it. But it’s important. Numbers can reveal some important stories. Reporters’ incompetence with numbers can allow officials to obscure their own incompetence or malfeasance. Whether you address math in specific workshops or individual coaching or as secondary content where it’s relevant, you need to be able to teach reporters and editors to master budgets and tax formulas. Learn the difference between mean and median, between percent and percentage points, so you can teach the difference. Improve your planning Analyze your own work. How do you do what you’re good at? These are potential topics for workshops, handouts or individual coaching sessions. Develop handouts. The act of writing a tip sheet will help you crystallize your thinking about a particular technique or issue. The handout will add value to your workshop as well as help you plan the workshop itself. Find examples. Any workshop is going to be more effective if you can cite examples to show the results of the techniques you are teaching. Think of your own experience and draw on incidents you can tell first-hand. Think of journalists you have worked with and draw on their experience. Think of outstanding work you have seen by other journalists. You might be able to show the final product to illustrate a point. Or you might be able to contact that journalist and learn how he produced that result. Ask your colleagues on the Newscoach list and we can frequently help provide examples from our experience. Improve your presentation skills Develop a strong opening. Your workshop will be most effective if you grab the audience’s attention immediately. Develop a strong closing. Your lessons stick with your audience more effectively with a strong wrap-up. Don’t end a training session with a whimper. If you’re going to allow a few minutes for questions and answers, do that before you have run out of time. Cut off the questions and go to your closing, so you end on a memorable note that reinforces an important point of your presentation. Plan interaction. Many speakers tell their audiences to “feel free to ask questions,” then are puzzled when they don’t. You need to go further. Ask the questions yourself, starting the discussion. Present a problem where you will lead a discussion among the group, seeking a solution. Develop exercises. Adults learn best by doing. Even if you offer a lot of good advice on a topic where you have strong expertise, your workshop will be more effective if you can include an exercise that will help colleagues apply what they are learning immediately. Watch yourself on video. Ask a colleague to record one of your workshops. Watching yourself on video will help you see and hear weaknesses and strengths in your presentation. If you stammer “you know” too often or fidget with the change in your pocket or with the flip-chart marker, you will see right away how distracting that can be and strengthen your presentation. Measure the impact of your training. Try using surveys before and after training to measure what people have learned and how they are applying the lessons on their jobs. The American Society for Training and Development has a certificate program in measuring and evaluating learning that will enhance your skills and your credentials. As you learn more about the impact of your training, you can improve your planning and presentation skills. Be a leader in newsroom training Share your experience. You have some training experience to share with colleagues. When someone asks for help on the Newscoach list or at a trainers conference, tell about your experience and offer some advice. Point colleagues to resources you have found helpful. Your reputation will grow. Someone may notice and ask you to come to a newsroom or conference and share your experience in greater depth. When you develop a workshop for your staff, share the story with your colleagues on Newscoach. You may write up a tip sheet as a handout for a workshop in your newsroom. Share it with a broader audience by sending the handout to me for posting, with credit, on the Web at No Train, No Gain. Develop a News University course. You probably have a topic (maybe several) about which you are really proud of the expertise you offer and how you teach it. Offer to develop an online course for News U (http://www.newsu.org/). The News U producers will be able to supply technical know-how that you lack and along the way you will gain new digital skills and online training skills. And the resulting class will raise your visibility, both for your expertise in the topic you teach and for your versatility in how you can train. Train Outside Your Newsroom. Offer to present one of your best workshops for your state press association, a National Writers’ Workshop or to other newsrooms in your company. As you train beyond your newsroom, your reputation will grow. Others will want to hire you to present workshops for their newsrooms. Learn from others Seek a mentor. Identify a training colleague whose work you admire and would like to emulate. Connect by email or at a conference and ask openly for help. Offer to take her out to lunch or a drink. Pick her brain. Learn how she developed that skill. Seek advice by phone and e-mail. Attend training programs. Watch for opportunities to educate yourself as a trainer, such as the annual training conferences at Poynter or an API Train the Trainer seminar. Investigate opportunities outside journalism to learn more about training, such as human resources studies at a local university or programs of the American Society for Training and Development (http://www.astd.org/). Promote Yourself Develop a web site. Journalists sometimes are bashful about self-promotion. But if you want to develop business as a newsroom trainer, you need to promote yourself. Develop a web site that promotes your services and tells potential clients what you can do. Offer more than promotional material, though. Post your handouts and/or exercises on your web site. Write a blog. Blog about the topics where you have some expertise. Become an online resource for colleagues. Contribute to No Train, No Gain. Some trainers’ web sites and blogs
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