Telling Ain't Training

As a student pursuing an advanced degree in training and development, I make it a point to put my hands on as many training books as possible. In doing so, I often find that I pick up books that are dry on delivery and could probably be summarized in far fewer pages than what they are worth. Fortunately, Telling Ain't Training is not one of those books. Despite the fact that some of the more useful tools can be hidden in content and the authors' stance on learning styles are a bit controversial at best, it is in my opinion that this book can really help training professionals to develop solid training strategies which help learners, make training more interesting, and help save companies time and money. Good: -Relevance and examples-Often times training books ramble on about practices with weak hypothetical situations or none at all. Sometimes to connect the material to the real life, the author must lead the way. This book does an excellent job connecting the ideas to real-life situations. -Best practice framework-This book is socked full of different frameworks to utilize when designing training, adopting online training, etc. These are valuable tools for trainers to bookmark and come back to later (*hint* I recommend readers bring some kind of ID tabs to help bookmark especially useful segments which can be tough to find later on). -Tools-I am not the most creative person in the world when it comes to designing training ideas, but this book introduces some solid ideas. I actually used some of the extra blank pages to record other awesome ideas I have run into. -Up-to-date-Because this is one of the most recent releases for a training book, it is naturally very up to date. There is nothing more painful than reading about video cassette tapes and overhead projectors... Sketchy: -The authors take a firm stand against keeping various learning styles into consideration. While they do advocate the use of various forms of presentation, it is not to accommodate learners with these styles. To be honest, this is the only part of the book where I stopped and said "Hmmm, I don't know about that..." My advice to the authors-drop it! That is such a small and insignificant part of your text. Don't risk hurting your credibility. -This is not a huge issue, but it is easy to lose some of the valuable stuff within the content. Again, I recommend that the readers come armed with sticky book marks they can label with. Though it could hike up the cost of the book, perhaps the authors could provide build-in tabs to mark these sections in future versions. So is it worth it to buy? While I have accumulated many different books about training, this is one I am keeping by my side through thick and thin. It is actually fun to read and the authors clearly practice what they preach. I had a hard time putting the thing down.

I needed this for a course I was taking. The university bookstore couldn't guarantee it was in stock and there would be a wait that would delay it until the second week of the six-week course. I checked out Amazon and and I had it delivered the afternoon of the second day (four days). I was impressed. The book itself, although written nearly a decade ago is still relevant, even the sections on online learning are current.

Good Book for Educators

Fabulous book. Must buy

He leído muchos libros sobre el tema de la formación, tanto de niños como de adultos, algunos muy buenos como what if.. de David Didau, aprender a aprender de Carey, why don't children like school de Willingham, Make it stick de Peter Brown et Al. Visible learning de Hattie, pero este es el mejor de todos, interesante, ameno, convincente... Todos los libros que he indicado aportan algo, pero si tuviera que leer uno solo y salir airoso en este tema tan complejo, me quedaría con este. Libro de cabecera de quien quiera formar adultos eficazmente. Incluye un par de capítulos muy interesantes sobre e.learning. Dice muchas cosas y ni una sola bobada o frase intrascendente pues lo que afirman los autores se nota que ha sido contrastado con una amplísima experiencia del mundo real.