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Re: best ways to do accessibility trainings virtually

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From: Steve Green
Date: Oct 27, 2022 10:23AM

This varies greatly depending on the culture of the company. I view continuous personal development as absolutely essential, so I used to give new testers 15 days off in their first year to do a variety of courses. In their second year I used to put them on a 3-day classroom-based course. After that, they typically did a few one-day courses and 4 to 6 days of conferences each year. We would also do lots of shorter in-house training sessions, from perhaps 30 minutes to a full day.

Now that we provide training courses, we find that some companies are willing to do the same - one put 10 people on a 4-day classroom-based course. However, others don't want to spend more than 1 to 2 hours, so I have often had to rip the guts out of a 1-day course to deliver what I can in a quarter of the time. Inevitably, this tends to leave little or no time for exercises that would help embed the knowledge. These companies never want to do the full course content in chunks, and I assume they just want to be able to say they have provided training and don't care how effective or comprehensive it is.

To answer your question, I would offer both the full day of training and the short videos, then monitor the demand and effectiveness of each. If you can show that people still need a lot of support despite having viewed the videos, you would then have a case for making the full day mandatory (assuming the quality of the video-based training is as good as it can be).

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd