Throughout 2010, I’ve spent months doing a lot of traveling, and talking to a lot of testers and test managers around the world.  I’ve been to various spots in North America, China, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, Turkey, and Germany.  No matter where I go, I hear two comments fairly consistently from test  managers and staff alike:  1) Management is pushing for increased productivity; and, 2) training budgets are tight.  For people to improve productivity, they have to improve their skills.  So, how can the smart test manager build the skills of her test  staff without breaking the bank?  Let’s  evaluate various options.

To start, you need a skills management plan.  First, you perform a task analysis.  In a task analysis, you examine the tasks that your staff performs as part of their regular (and perhaps irregular) duties.  From this analysis, you then create a list of skills that someone would need to effectively and efficiently perform those tasks.

Second, you create a skills inventory.  In this step, for each of the skills you identified, you assess what skills level a perfectly qualified person would have, for each of the positions in your teams.  (This assumes that you have some degree of specialization in your teams, in that people are not considered interchangeable, but rather are assigned tasks based on their positions.)  You then assess your current team against these skills.

Third, based on this information, you can now perform a gap analysis for the skills in your current team.  In other words, what’s the gap between your current team and the perfect team? This tells you where skills augmentation is needed, and thus where training can have a positive return on investment.

Finally, your skills management plan must address how people will apply the skills you intend to improve.  This requires an opportunity to put those new skills to real-world use, on real tasks, within a few weeks (at most) of the person obtaining those new skills. It’s a classic worst-practice of training to send people to training courses and then assume that somehow, magically, that training will someday translate into increased effectiveness and efficiency.  In such cases, these new skills often molder unused so long that, by the time you need them, the skills are forgotten.

Okay, if you’ve followed these four steps, you now have a specific list of skills that you want to improve, for each member of your team, along with a plan for how to utilize those improved skills.  Time to select training options.

The training options you have available constitute both a spectrum and an a la carte menu.  The options are a spectrum in that the degree of investment ranges from high to low.  The options are also an a la carte menu in that you can certainly select multiple options, not just one.

The first option is live, instructor-led courses.  This can involve either sending one or more staff members to a public course, or having the course run at one or more sites in your company.  The advantages of live, instructor-led courses are the immediate attention of the instructor (including direct interaction when questions arise and discussions of the application of the concepts to specific situations) and, for on-site courses, the possibility of making the course a hands-on workshop focused on your specific skills gaps.  In addition, for some staff members, having them devote their time entirely to training for a continuous period improves their focus and retention.  The effectivity of knowledge transfer is maximized, but so is the cost.

A second option, closely related, is what is called a virtual course.  In such a course, the instruction happens synchronously, as with a live course.  The course is instructor-led.  However, the instructor leads the course via a webinar or similar virtual classroom. This can cost less per attendee, but some less self-directed attendees can lose focus over time.

The third option is e-learning.  This typically involves some kind of asynchronous, browser-based interactive application.  The course should include some kind of presentation (e.g., animated slides) accompanied by a recorded audio lecture. Such courses should also include exercises and some kind of regular check of comprehension of the material. The latter is important because, since the instructor cannot monitor attendee comprehension directly in real-time, the attendees must check their own comprehension.  Typical ways to check comprehension include multiple choice questions about the material covered in the last few minutes of the e-learning lecture.

Some types of e-learning are called blended e-learning.  Blended e-learning combines webinar-type facilitation sessions with an asynchronous e-learning course.  The facilitation is instructor-led, and typically includes anywhere from two to six such sessions.  In these sessions, the instructor reinforces key ideas from the course.  Facilitation provides attendees with an opportunity to ask questions, and also provides structure that helps to keep less self-directed attendees engaged.

Pure asynchronous e-learning is typically considerably less expensive than live, instructor-led training, sometimes as much as half or a third as much.  Indeed, you can often purchase e-learning course enterprise licenses that allow the training of an unlimited number of attendees for a relatively small fixed cost. The addition of facilitation sessions adds cost, but savvy training customers can find ways to balance the cost of facilitation against the benefit.

A fourth option is self-study.  In such a situation, an attendee uses books, articles, blogs, podcasts, videos, and web-site materials to learn.  The range internet options makes self-study truly attractive, and no one can argue with the price.  Buying one or two books and spending a few hours availing oneself of free internet resources is cheap.  Of course, the risk is that the attendee will spend time reading what are effectively sales pitches or, worse yet, really bad ideas.

The fifth option is cross-training and other forms of on-the-job training.  In such programs, you assigned someone a task—and a mentor—that will allow them to expand their skills.  Obviously, the cost of such an approach is low, though remember to take into account the efficiency costs on both the person learning the new skill and the mentor. Even when other training options are used, I suggest that every skills growth initiative should include this option as the last step of cementing the new skills.  For example, if someone takes an e-learning course, they can then be assigned a mentor and a task that involves one or more of the new skills they have acquired.

As managers, the economic exigencies of the current economy require that we become more effective and efficient in our use of all our resources.  In software testing, people are indeed the most important resource, because software testing work is brain-work. Training, in one form of another, is an essential part of becoming more effective and efficient.  To use train your staff properly, start with a proper understanding of what they need to know—and what they currently don’t know.  Next, select options such as instructor-led training, e-learning, self-study, and cross-training to ensure proper skills transfer and the application of those skills to real-world problems.  If you develop and execute a smart skills-growth plan that covers these elements, you can expect significant improvements in your team’s abilities over the next six to eighteen months.