Speaking, Training, and Classes

Here are some of the training materials, courses, and in some instances, recordings I’ve done over the last few years.

Viewing PDFS in a Browser

My documents are all PDFs. If you want to open and view them in Chrome instead of downloading them, here are the instructions for doing so in Chrome.

Starting in June of 2020, I began teaching the third class in the Technical Writing Certificate Program, called Production Techniques and Technologies. Currently, I am contracted to teach the course again in April of 2021. Each January, they develop a schedule for the upcoming year, so we don’t have additionally scheduled courses at this time. I created the contents for the ten-week program. I’ve included a recording and some sample materials I created for the course as I own the copywrites on most of the materials used in the course.

I started out developing course material using PowerPoint presentations but after hearing that my students had a difficult time following along in the course, after week 3, I changed to creating documentation in Word and just demonstrating how to use the various tools in class. They could then more easily use Word documents to do their homework. I did this because most students only used their laptops without a second monitor. That was a big aha moment for me. The other two teachers in the program teach concepts, which are much more easily taught with PowerPoints.

• About the Production Techniques and Technologies course
• PowerPoint from Week 1: Class Introduction and Expectation
• PowerPoint 2 from Week 1 – Class Word Styles*
• Handout for Word Class – Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows
• Documentation from Week 5 – Working with MadCap Flare class after replacing PPTs with Word instructions

*I had some fun with different templates while using PowerPoint to get students interested in using the tool, playing with it, and experimenting. So you’ll see some more “wild” designs in a couple of my samples.

My documents are all PDFs. If you want to open and view them in Chrome instead of downloading them, here are the instructions for doing so in Chrome.

Click here for a list with descriptions and a few links to events I’ve spoken at from 2018-2020 at the Society for Technical Communication. This is a professional development organization of which I have been the president of our local chapter for the last three years.

Amazon Technical Recruiter Academy

I worked as a Program Manager and Instructional Designer for Amazon’s Recruiter Academy Program. The Recruiter Academy was a 26-week program that taught 18 students the Event Recruiting Process Model* as used at Amazon. I was able to meet the needs of the current program and to “productize” the entire program for Global release. Now any recruiting team in the world can take this “productized” version from the sandbox and install it for any Amazon Technical Recruiting Team world-wide and ramp-up to teach recruiters event model recruiting and they will be teaching essentially the same material world-wide.

Accomplishments:

• Developed a syllabus for a 26-week technical Recruiter Training Program’s event-recruiting process.
• Created over 20 courses (Word, PPTs, Job Aids, and supporting materials) in under 4 mos.
• Created Wiki and SharePoint infrastructure to deliver courses, and to also create separate published from review and student sandbox courses.

*The Event Recruiting Process Model involves the following:

1. Reaching out to approximately 25,000 software developers or technical program or project managers about 8 weeks prior to putting an event together anywhere in the world where they may find them to see if they want to work for Amazon. If they say yes, they are asked to submit their resume.
2. Resumes are reviewed and suitable candidates are sent a technical test to qualify them.
3. Those who pass the test will then go through a phone screen.
4. Acceptable candidates will be invited to attend the event. (Usually up to 200.)
5. Managers are scheduled and support staff are also scheduled to attend.
6. On the day of, people are scheduled for 4 interviews. If they pass the first 3 interviews, they will have the 4th interview with a senior manager (bar breaker).
7. After returning from the event, the managers who have openings will have a pool to select candidates they’d like to hire and those managers may not have attended the recruiting event. Think of a sports pool.
8. Offers are made to the attendees. It is at this point where the potential employees find out what their role will be, where they will move to, and what business unit they will be part of.

Here are links to several items I developed for Amazon:

• Introduction to SharePoint Training – The documentation set included a ReadMe.doc, PPT, and Word document but only the document is included. I developed this course and while I wasn’t hired to train, they decided I had the most knowledge of SharePoint sites and their intended usage in the cohorts, so I also gave the training.
• Recruiter Event Model Training – In this set, I’ve included both the PPT and the Word document, saved as PDF files.
  • Recruiter Academy Program Events Model
  • Recruiter Academy Program Events Model Documentation

Introduction to Technical Writing Facilitator’s Guide

I created a custom course for the Navy with a budget of 40 hours. Because of the small budget, the original course was a hybrid document created in PowerPoint. It resembled a regular document in that it contained more information than a traditional PPT presentation so it would be usable as a stand-alone document. I didn’t want students focused on taking notes, but on having material to refer back to later.

After delivering the course, I decided to create a Facilitator’s Guide so I could package and sell the course to other facilitators. I’ve uploaded part of the course here as a sample. It contains the first two sections of PowerPoint slides broken down by objective.

Note: Because the PPT slides are embedded in the document so they are not included here.

Facilitator’s Guide (Partial Sample)