Timely Tips© Volume 4, Issue 2; February 2007: Consider YouTube as a “Spot Training” Resource

Hi everyone! Randy Dean here writing this version of Timely Tips live from Wiesbaden, Germany, where I’ve had the pleasure of leading some training programs for a valued client. This month’s tip is an interesting tip for all of you Internet surfers and “YouTubers”, and may provide a clever way for you to provide “spot training” for yourself and others on the acquisition of desired and very specific technology skills (and possibly spot training in other areas).

What I’ve found out is that many training and performance consultants have been posting “mini” skills-training videos out on YouTube YouTube, and I’ve decided to join this party by adding my own channel:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=JanaRandyDean

Here, you can see my recent “Taming the E-mail Beast” demo video (Parts I & II), produced by Take2Media http://www.take2mediaproductions.com. Kim and Jim from Take2Media deserve some great credit here – they took my raw video footage from a recent live training and did some excellent post-production enhancements to truly make this a wonderful demo video. They also helped me through the technical details of posting this video out on YouTube so that the whole world can see. If you are looking to do any kind of video production work in the near future, from simply moving old taped footage to disc or DVD, all the way up to creating, producing, editing, and posting professional quality video productions, I recommend you contact Jim or Kim at Take2Media –Take2mediaproductions.com

You’ll also notice on my You Tube channel that you can listen to the “picture-enhanced” audio replay (Parts I to VII) of my most recent “Taming the E-mail Beast” preview teleseminar (nearly 50 minutes of audio) – good for all of you that weren’t able to make one of the recent “Taming the E-mail Beast” teleseminar calls (another round is scheduled: www.randalldean.com/email_teleseminar1.html This way, you can actually listen to the entire audio program at your own convenience, and also see some really nice travel photos from some recent trips I’ve taken! (In the future, we’ll actually be doing a screen-capture version with an integrated “Taming E-mail” MS PowerPoint presentation that will be presented with the audio file – look for more information on that soon.)

This is the goal of what my channel on YouTube will be all about: creating and posting relevant and useful “mini-content” training snippets that will be available as a post-program resource for people that attend my programs. What better way would there be to reinforce your learnings from a live program you recently attended than to have a related web site with audio and video content you can visit one to two weeks following the program? I recommend that you consider subscribing to my YouTube channel – that way, you’ll be notified whenever I post new content – including these new “mini-content” training snippets.

And I also recommend that you visit my “Playlists” section of my YouTube channel. Here, you’ll see links to my teleseminar replays, and also to several Outlook tutorials. I have found several useful MS Outlook training tutorials from other expert users out on YouTube, and have posted them here in my “playlists” for your convenience. This leads to my final suggestion this month: if you ever have a very specific technology training question for a specific piece of software, or a specific software process, you might want to try searching for it on YouTube, and also possibly on Google and Yahoo! There might be a mini-audio or mini-video file out there on the web somewhere for you to find and use to answer your question. And if you find one that is really useful, consider sending the link to that audio or video to your whole work team! Because YouTube generally limits most providers’ videos to 10 minutes or less, the videos are usually short and sweet, and that is perfect for adult learners – quick, encapsulated content that they can immediately acquire and assimilate – a useful tool indeed! (The only downside that I see – you sometimes have to spend some time surfing through some silly or “questionable” content to find the ones that have real training/skills acquisition value.)

So, if you haven’t already, take a spin on YouTube, and use my new channel --

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=JanaRandyDean -- as your first place to start (remember to subscribe!) If you find great content-rich training videos while out there “YouTubing”, please send me the link. If I like them, I’ll post them in my playlists section.

Until next month, Stay Timely!