Training:
How to Enjoy
the Mahony Advantage
Who-How counts just as much in training your people as in the selection of consultants:
1. Who’s teaching? Can he or she communicate well with the students, and how adaptable to computers are the people getting the instruction?
2. What task is being taught? A very teachable one?
3. Why is the material taught? To make your people computer literate in a broad way? Just to help them do their present jobs better?
4. When do the students learn? On their time or yours? Will you reward them in any way for their extra effort?
5. Where is the learning happening? Ideally, your students can take the machines home if they want—one advantage of transportables like the IBM portable and its work-alikes.
6. How do the students learn? Through instruction manuals, mainly, or through early experience at the keyboard? Do they suffer through irrelevant exercises, or do they start right away on assignments similar to their jobs? In fact, do they start immediately on their normal work, as some training experts recommend? Do the students work with teaching disks? And are the disks interactive, as Adam Green, the training expert, correctly recommends? Do the disks, in other words, require you to type in a thoughtful response?
“How much?” also figures here. Consider the cost of a good training program versus your losses from misused or underused people. In the future you may want an office filled with people conversant with WordStar or dBASE, but don’t shrug off valued employees who can’t even play an Atari game. Tutor them if need be. Bend. You needn’t be sentimental, just practical. Don’t waste the Mahony Advantage, as I’ll call it; don’t throw away a mixture of background and experience that silicon won’t ever fully replicate.
Unfortunately, Jim Mahony’s employer didn’t take full advantage of the Mahony Advantage.