.. talking earlier as to how we could change that mix (men to women at the conference) but we can’t hire what isn’t there.

This is what started the conversation. Zilla is sincere in wanting to see more women, but there do not seem to be women available with the proper skillset, so how can more women be hired? So a woman asked him about his job, in particular how much it paid, and he basically told her how hard the job is.

I thought it was weird he’d complain about no women to hire, and tell a woman who asked about pay how sucky the job is. To be far, zilla is an extremely strait shooter, doesn’t mince words, and doesn’t sugar his responses about anything (and that is why I like him!). So he was just being honest about what the job requires, and he’s a geek not an recruiting rep. He’s not the only person that describes jobs in our industry in that straight-forward way, and lets be honest there is a tremendous amount of work and stress that comes with many of our roles. But shouldn’t we sell the good parts first, tell about the challenges of the role, and let the individual decide if they want to risk it? Maybe this is one of the problems the industry has?

Another lady jumped in and reminded us about the study of young girls to find out why they don’t want to go into technology. Reasons: girls think that computers and engineering are “boring” , “filled with nerds” and “you are stuck to a desk all day” and most strangely that “there is no money in it”.

This got me thinking – how the heck did I get into, and stay in technology if all the job descriptions suck? I’ll tell my story, and ladies, please tell yours!

I have always loved to break things to figure out how they work. I’ve written before about how I grew up very poor, so the only time I got to figure out how things work was when one of my dad’s best friends, who was a garbage collector, would bring me broken transistor radios. I loved tearing things apart.

I went to community college as a non-trad, and they first tried to put me in business school. I said nope, I want to do Electronics. I mostly wanted to take the EET curriculum to find out how sound and video ACTUALLY went over the air waves. I was so happy when we finally got to that.

I could have stopped there, but I had started to teach myself (and my instructors) how to do HTML and had been taking programming courses. This was in 1999, and some of my brother’s friends we finishing their CS degrees, and were telling me how much money I could make with a Bachelor’s degree. So I decided to risk it and transferred to Florida State.

So what was my motivation? My kids. I wanted a steady job, with insurance. When I found out I could have that as well as make enough money to try and make up for all the years I lived under the poverty level, not to mention doing work I was very interested in, I was sold. That mother’s instinct to care for her family should not be underestimated. I’ve put up with all sorts of nonsense to provide for my kids. I would even have considered the job description ‘zilla gave.

So what is your story? What motivated you to become a technologist, and what has kept you in the field? Maybe we can start telling stories about how all the nonsense of the jobs are worth it, and convince more women to make the move to work with us. Leave a comment here, or write a post linking back here. And spread the word!

2007

The idea was an evolution — so let’s start at the beginning.

The first year EMC had an innovation conference was 2007. For some reason, I was nominated to be a judge of the conference. So it was me – an individual contributor (from the education department no less!!) — and a bunch of Senior VPs judging the most innovative ideas at EMC. Boy was that weird. Take away from 2007: Senior VPs are nice people who listen to ICs after all.

2008

The second year of the Innovation Conference – 2008 – I was pumped up. I worked with some folks in my organization who have their PhDs in IS and Performance (one of them from FSU!) on the idea that we should create a customizable PLE (personal learning environment).  We explained the business need for a PLE, defined educational terms, and then laid out what the PLE would actual do.  In the first iteration, we saw two important facets, a PLE with the Portfolio:

PLE Components

Formal Learning

• Assigned Learning Path: Information pulled from the Education Services Portal about Technical courses as well as EMCU courses

Informal Learning

• eRooms: A list of eRooms the user should be accessing, based on role
• Email Distribution Lists: A list of email distribution lists that can be accessed for information, based on role
• EMC ONE Communities: A list of EMC ONE communities that can be accessed for information, based on role
• Departmental Learning Resources: A list of wikis, message boards, shares, etc that can be accessed for information
• Industry Specific Resources: A configurable widget that allows the learner to bring in external information using RSS feeds. This information could be blogs, websites, conference information, message boards, etc.

Demonstrate Competency

This was a way for learners to prove they had gained competency of a skill in all sorts of ways (not restricted to formal learning):

• Formal Learning: A list of courses that the learner has successfully completed
• Certifications: A list of certifications that the learner has obtained
• Link to Employee Blog: Links to relevant posts in the learner’s blog that prove competencies
• Link to Employee Portfolio: Link to the employee’s portfolio, with a better picture of how the employee feels he or she is meeting the competencies for the role

Description of the Personal Portfolio

We didn’t feel like it was enough to have a checklist of what each employee could do. We wanted a way for the employee to demonstrate skill and comptency beyond the restrictions of the LMS, or even practice groups. We felt that the Personal Portfolio should be controlled by the employee and should include:

• A blog: The employee can blog about their accomplishments, lessons learned engagements, etc. This will develop the social media skills of EMC’s workforce, and also provide a place to document skills that may not be captured by the formal learning process.
• Competencies based on role: This should be a pre-populated widget that brings in the competencies that have been determined for the employee’s role.
• Development Plan: This information is pulled from the Education Services portal. It includes the development plan and a list of the employee’s mentors
• My 5-Year Plan: The employee should also be able to look at the competencies of other roles, so that they can make personal decisions about what skills they need to develop in order to advance their career. This widget should be personalized by the employee, with their goals and plans for the next 5-years.
• Other information: This widget will allow the employee to import information that proves their competency from  other social media sites, such as LinkedIn
• Privacy Settings: The employee should have the option to advertise their portfolio to everyone within EMC. If they choose to keep the portfolio private, the employee’s management team will always have access to view it.

2009

Lets jump to the 2009 Submission. We tried to make the idea short and to the point, I think that may have been our fatal flaw. This is what we submitted:

Practical problem solved:

This solves the problem helping all EMC employees (customer-facing and non-customer-facing) have access to the learning environments that make the best sense to them, so they are able to learn faster and execute better than our competitors.

There are many different silos of learning assets in and outside of EMC. We have official formal training from Ed Services, we have communities, we have documentation on Powerlink. Outside EMC there are blogs, communities, technical groups, etc. How do we enable individuals to create their own Personal Learning Environments to keep up with this data?

How it works:

We need to make it easier for our knowledge workers to build their own Personal Learning Environment (PLE).

This could be done by building a widget-keeper that could be installed on someone’s desktop, their blog, or even their profile on EMC|ONE. The keeper could recommend widgets based on the individual’s role. For example, someone in sales would have an Ed Services widget that is connected to SABA, so their formal learning path is visible. They could also have a widget for relevant EMC|ONE info, competitive info, Powerlink information, etc. They would have an RSS widget to gather their own learning links, as well as other social media links to help them stay connected to the sales (and customer) community.

2010

So will we try in 2010? Perhaps.

I definitely think that a PLE can be enabled from a corporate education group. We are chartered with helping the workforce learn, and to help them be ready to work. We know we can’t do this on our own. Why not provide the workers with a way to get organized, to access the critical information they need to do their jobs in the most efficient manner? And on top of that, give them a way to bring in all the other ways of learning that make sense to *them*?

This is my dream. Maybe one day I’ll be working on it!

Well, the security experts at RSA (the security division for EMC) have been posting blog posts on the very same topic! Sam Curry says in this post that this past July saw a new record high of 13,212 phishing attacks. He says:

Online criminals are also using technology better: more leverage of DNS and less reliance on IP addresses means a large, redundant network of phishing sites.

He also quotes Jacqui Cheng from Arstechnica.com:

“Of course, both companies are only talking about e-mail phishing scams in their reports. Researchers and IT admins have been warning that social networks are increasingly becoming vectors for phishing attacks, and in-session phishing attacks (after you already log into a legitimate website) are becoming more prevalent as well. Clearly, the Web is where it’s at when it comes to seeding new attacks into the wild, so the “drop” in phishing scams might be better described as an evolution.”

If you are interested in details of how one of these attacks work, check out this post from RSA Labs. The post talks about the Zeus Trojan, which steals personal information once it has been downloaded onto your computer. As soon as it has the info, it uses Jabber (an instant messaging tool) to send the personal credentials to a criminal who then use the credentials. The scary thing? RSA Labs traced the trojan from financial institutions in the US.

So be careful out there guys!

The learner is the product of education

To me that means the product of education isn’t a diploma, or a certificate. The product of education is the delta between the individual’s knowledge from when they started the instruction and when the instruction is over.

That makes lots of sense to me. It started me thinking of my daughter. For those of you who don’t know, my daughter has Asperger’s Syndrome. She was not formally diagnosed until she was a teenager, but I always knew her little brain worked differently than most everyone else.

One reason she was diagnosed so late is that she talked very early. She was saying words at 4 months, and talking in sentences before she was 1. She took a long time to learn to walk, and thinking back I believe its because she was having sensory issues. We’d hold her little hands and try and coax her to walk, but if we let go she would sit down and emphatically tell us NO!!!! My friends used to tease me because my daughter would sit on the ground and say, “Mom can I have a cookie” but she couldn’t walk. She was probably about 12 or 13 months at the time.

Of course we encouraged it. So did my brothers, who were all teenagers at the time. They loved having a little parrot around. But looking back, she wasn’t really having conversations. She had just figured out using words was a good way to explore the world. She never did the thing where babies crawl everywhere and stick things in their mouths…she asked questions. She would ask the same question 6 or 7 different ways. And we’d answer 6 or 7 ways if we could. But she could talk before she was one, so didn’t that prove that she was smart and perfect? (And yes of course she is brilliant and as close to perfect as you can get!).

The other thing that is typical of folks on the spectrum is that they usually have at least one special interest. It becomes all they want to talk about. That gets very, very annoying. One of my daughter’s earliest special interests was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don’t remember much about it, but she must have been going on and on about Ninja Turtles because one day I told her that the Turtles were named after famous artists.

She couldn’t believe that. So I took her to the public library and we checked out four children’s picture books about Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael. Now was my daughter content that I had proved the names came from artists? Was she content to just look at the pictures?

Of course not. She wanted to know the stories behind each of the famous works of art. This led to a new special interest – Greek and Latin mythology stories. At some point a few years later I couldn’t take the Greek stories anymore had to branch off again, I told her that the constellations all had stories too. This sent her off on a journey to discover everything about that topic. I think this helped solidify her love of stories.

So what does this have to do with Downes?

We have to stop looking at a degree as the end result of education. I found ways to use my daughter’s special interests to help her learn more, to help her have more than one special interest. This is important to unlock the potential off of us have. Early on I fell victim to measuring what she needed based on norms – I should have realized her speaking so early was telling me something else.

My friend calls me about her friend’s son quite often these days. She thinks the boy must be on the spectrum, and asks for advice (the boy reminds her of my daughter). The boy is 11 or 12, and his special interest in Mario. He carries a Mario doll to school, he is obsessed with plumbing and mushrooms. They met a young Japanese lady at the beach and the boy immediately drew her a picture of Princess Peach. My advice to her: make sure the parents play Mario! That seems so obvious.

Relationship to Corporate Learning

It seems to me we have to measure by the change in the individual learner. If that is what we measure, how do we create the best environment for individuals to learn? We can’t individualize instruction, so how do we show them the path to the things that will help them learn? How can we help them get from Ninja Turtles to Persephone?

Here was my answer to that question:

But both of these questions got me thinking about my personal learning environment. Social media plays a huge role in how I learn these days. I’ve been comparing the way I use social media for learning to fishing. Let me explain what I mean.

Its like fishing

There are a few areas for which I am always looking for information:

• Education (for school and work)
• Management software, networking, SANs, etc (for work)
• Autism in adults (personal reasons)

I put out a line to lots of different places, hoping to get a nibble. If I have a project that creates a need to search for information on one of these topics, I just follow the line and look at all the information that has been gathered.

But sometimes there will be lots of activity on the line, so I will go and check on it to see what is going on in that space.

Here are the social media places I look for info:

Newsgator

I use Newsgator for my RSS aggregator. I follow lots of EMC folks, and lots of people who blog about our industry. I follow lots of edubloggers. I also follow lots of autism and Aspie bloggers.

I try to go check on this line at least once a week. But if I get busy, sometimes I forget to check the line.

Twitter

I use Tweetdeck to organize twitter. I follow a lot of folks, and I have them separated into groups like “work” and “edu”. I also have search columns for specific topics, and that is usually related to what is going on for that day. For instance, if there is a conference, I will have a conference tag column. If it is Thursday or Friday, I will have a #lrnchat column.

I can pay attention to tweetdeck more often than I do newsgator. Sometimes I will notice the people I am following are all talking about the same thing, or using the same tag. If I notice that, I’ll try and figure out what has captured everyone’s attention.

I also seem to come across information I need much quicker using my twitter network.

My Blog

I’ve written before about how I use my blog as reflective practice on what I am learning. I also learn quite a bit from the people who take the time to comment on my posts, or to link back to me.

EMC|ONE

At EMC we have an internal social media site known as EMC|ONE. It rides on the Clearspace platform. One way to manage the experience with Clearspace is to receive email notifications for the different spaces. There are several technical communities I follow. I don’t always interact in the community – sometimes I just watch for activity on the line that would either impact or help my course development efforts. I most always share those tidbits with the folks on my team.

I am sure there are other ways I use social media to learn. I didn’t even mention Facebook, IM, diigo, meebo, or delicious.

The point is that these tools help me keep an eye on the subjects I am interested in, even if these subjects change very rapidly. My goal is to find a way to make this way of learning easy for everyone else.

How about you – do you use social media to learn?

The book is officially out now. You can go to the EMC Education Services web portal to learn more about where to order the book. The book is so important to Information and Storage professionals because it was written to be a reference book about the technologies required to store, access, manage, and protect information.

40 of my colleagues participated in writing this book. I think its a great tool if this is the sort of work you are involved in.

Check out the official press release, and also what other EMC bloggers think (here and here). And of course come discuss what you think about the need for a reference such as this over in the Proven Professional community.

Three of the nominees and our professor met each other on Landis Green in Second Life. Apparently they also had it displayed while we were waiting – which is a little scary because we were being quite silly.

Here are the pics I took.

Congrats Matt!!

As you can probably tell from the coverage, this release is a very big deal for EMC. Until today, information about the V-Max system was tightly guarded. So you have to wonder, how do you train the folks who need to be ready for such a big, secret release?

To find the answer to that question, I sat down with Nancy Gessler, who is the Director of New Product Readiness for EMC Education Services. She gave some great insight into what it takes to design and deliver education inside a big technical corporation. Here’s what she had to say:

Nancy, tell us a little about your responsibilities

My team develops and delivers technical training for our field employees and partners who are responsible for Presales, Installation/Integration, and Support for hardware and software across EMC’s product lines. Specifically we prepare the field and partners for launch readiness before a product is able to be sold.   We produced almost 500 courses last year in support of approximately 170 launches.

Today EMC had a huge announcement about the Symmetrix V-Max.  Can you talk about your role in that release from an education perspective?

Since Symmetrix is EMC’s longstanding, flagship platform, we needed to begin analysis and strategy very early.  We knew there would be lots of folks that we would need to train.

This is considered a “complex” launch from the training perspective because it involved new hardware and software changes.  Complex launches typically involve several different learning modalities and multiple training assets:

• eLearning accompanied by remote labs so students can get hands-on on the key software features
• ILT for installation because the hardware platform was brand new and they needed to see and touch it
• The inclusion of multi-media,  whiteboard sessions, and video tutorials as an element of the eLearning assets to add additional value

A few days ago I posted about the importance of using a systems approach to instructional design. I would think  there were some real system challenges in figuring out how to enable readiness for such a huge product launch. First of all, how did you figure out who needed to be trained?

Training has to be geo based, and the forecasted number of internal EMC folks to be trained was almost 1,400.  That number includes “core” Symmetrix hardware and software resources.  Because Symmetrix is a key platform, there are many folks focused on “affinity” technologies that will also take this training but are not part of the initial forecast.  The PreGA training cycle began Feb 17 to ensure a certain percent of the population are trained and ready at the external announce date.  It will continue to run through at least the end of May to accommodate the folks who need hardware ILT training and hands-on lab activities for software.

What analysis did you do to come up with the learning objectives?

We are very experienced with job task requirements for the key field roles.  We examine the software and hardware changes that are planned and then cross reference that with the job task requirements to come up with the “draft plan of attack”.  This generally happens early on so we can assess number of resources and timelines required for development, delivery and course production.    This launch consisted of the following areas that required training (which post analysis were compiled into 13 separate development projects for our Symmetrix team):

• 1 Hardware Platform
• 1 Hardware Operating System
• 2 supporting software packages
• 8 “open systems” software packages
• 7 mainframe software packages

How many learning assets did you have to create to meet the objectives?

We produced a total of nine deliverables to support this launch – one instructor led offering and eight blended eLearning assets, along with lab workbooks for the hands-on lab activities that we will support remotely via a virtual data center.

Which internal EMC organizations had a stake in what was being taught?

As part of standard practice, our stakeholders are always involved with approving a training proposal which provides the details of the training deliverables – number of courses, modality, objectives and key topics, and projected length of the deliverable.   We are dependent on Marketing to ensure any technical positioning is in alignment and we put the right “spin” on the technical details in support of presales activities.  Since we are working with “versioning code” throughout the development lifecycle, we are dependent on Engineering for technical validation.  All of our projects go through a comprehensive content review that includes the prior mentioned organizations.

When did you first learn of the project?

I had a general awareness for quite some time – more than a year, but concrete planning started around August of 2008 with an expected training availability date of late Q1.

How long did you have to complete the development & delivery of this instruction?

Training development started approximately November of 2008, but did not kick into high gear until we had working systems and code.  Initially our folks worked with Engineering to get a sense of how a feature would work and how to get hardware and software up and running.  There is a lot of time spent getting equipment and labs functioning before actual “training development” begins.

How many developers and/or instructors worked on the project?

There were 13 technical subject matter experts (SMEs), two managers responsible for hardware and software work streams, and three instructional designers aligned to this project.

What challenges are there when creating training for products that are not fully “cooked”, and are part of a secret launch?

The key challenge is how to approach the launch.  Planning is extremely key.  The planning phase is generally about 3 or 4 weeks for a project like this one.

A complex launch requires a thorough impact analysis of feature and function – there were a couple hundred features we had to analyze.  This analysis has to be matrixed against audience job roles.  Triaging feature and function and the impact to job roles provides the focus areas for key deliverables and how content will be chunked.

The next challenge is immutable deadlines, so we need to schedule timelines for the number of anticipated deliverables and how many SMEs will be needed to work in parallel.   Then the issue of how to homogenize independently developed content so there is some amount of consistency across the deliverables.

Then the tactical phase commences – getting equipment, building an appropriate technical environment that will support development and to allow time for our SMEs to get experience with the hardware and software before actual development begins.  Initial code does not have all features/functions working as expected so there is an iterative process that takes place across several code drops.

The people are an incredibly important ingredient to addressing the challenges of a complex launch.  They need to have good technical breadth and depth and strong knowledge of the key and affinity technologies.  They also have to be able to deal with uncertainty and complexity as while we are in the development process, code and other components are evolving.

This project is evidence that proper planning and strong resources can be successful when addressing a challenging and strategic launch as the Symmetrix V-Max Series proved to be.

Well there you have it….a working example of why you have to have a systems approach when designing instruction. I know for a fact my colleagues worked very, very hard…many nights and weekends…to get our company ready to introduce the Symmetrix V-Max to the world. Thanks Nancy for the insight into the guts of corporate education.

I’m using my lunch break tomorrow to help some folks set up Twitter accounts. This is not the first time I’ve done this, so I decided to put together a job aide for people.

Its definitely 101 level for Twitter, just how basics of how to get an account, set it up, and look for people to follow.

You can download it here.

I do not like the second page…so it needs some polish I know. Someone suggested adding in something about shortening URLs, so I did (sort of). Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

I’ve written before about the importance of storage education, and really its more than just storage education. Where are we going to find workers trained in end-to-end management of information systems? Who is teaching folks coming out of school topics such as:

• Challenges and solutions for data storage and data management
• Intelligent storage systems
• Storage networking (FC-SAN, IP-SAN, NAS)
• Backup, recovery, and archive (including CAS)
• Business continuity and disaster recovery
• Storage security and virtualization
• Managing and monitoring the storage infrastructure

That’s what this book is all about. I know I would have LOVED an end-to-end book like this when I came to EMC straight out of college. How about you?