The Curmudgeonly Trainer

This is a free manual designed to cover off coaching skills for trainers and managers who do on the job training. It’s produced by the CDS, Workplace Safety and Health Division.
You can get it in pdf format free of charge by clicking here.
It’s in the form of a workbook with exercises. Watch out for common [...]

The recent exchange with Gary Lear about reliability and validity really highlights one of the major problems with these instruments and their usage. THIS IS IN NO WAY MEANT TO COMMENT ON GARY, BUT ON THE GENERAL SITUATION.
Even the companies that train and certify people to administer these tests are turning out people with a [...]

Ok, I guess it’s time to really wrap this up, this MBTI question. I realize that there are those that believe and those that don’t. I have to offer the observation that this is like discussing religion or politics. No amount of facts, research is going to change the minds of those that hold the [...]

Another oft quoted set of statistics often stated by trainers has to do with differing retention rates for different learning activities. Here’s a message on trainer posted, and my response.
Rita wrote:
> Thank you all for your feedback on training retention rate statistics. My
> apologies for this long message.
>
> I have the information now, although slightly [...]

“eLearning” is probably the largest growth sector in training and development. While its adoption has been somewhat faddish, with a lot of bandwagon jumping, there’s no question that there is great promise. There are now over two decades of empirical data to look at to discover what works and what doesn’t with the use of [...]

Upon being chastized for spelling errors for allegedly incorrect spelling of Dewey Duck, Mr. Bacal responds:
> You ain’t that great a speller yourself. Among other things, in the same
> comment you misspelled the name of Dewey Duck.
I think you are making some possibly faulty inferences here. First I was not talking about “that” family [...]

CNN is reporting massive demonstration in U.S. cities, apparently lead by an underground organization called: Revolutionary Front For The Preservation of English Conventions Long Outdated.
Lead by octaganerian Che Strunk, demonstraters are lobbying the U.N. for a formal code of punctuation to apply to all languages.  Che, in an interview, said:
“This has to stop. We have [...]

Gary  wrote:
> So I guess the point I’m trying to make is that often those who are the
> most vocal about the “correct” way to call someone or some group of
> people, etc., that these people are perhaps not as comfortable with their
> own selves as perhaps they would like to be.
Gary, I’m sorry, but [...]

Sadly, even trainers who ought to know more about stress don’t always. While there are many good trainers in stress management, there are a lot of bad ones with superficial understanding.
Here’s an example of one trainers attempt to explain stress, and my response.
I had a couple of email questions regarding my response and I have [...]

The standards set for MBTI certification are set by the vending company, in EXACTLY the same way that the standards might be set by Langevin — they get to choose.
The requirements to administer the MBTI are not nearly high enough to qualify anyone to use a psychometric test of any kind, even the MBTI, [...]