Training Requires a Commitment From You

As many of you know, I give a lot presentations throughout the country and I also have been privileged to travel to other countries and participate in international meetings as well. A couple of months before these meetings I am always asked to submit outlines of my presentations. The event’s organizers do this so that individual states can review the information and provide recertification credits to attendees. In some cases, like the Purdue University Pest Control Conference or NPCA meetings, a workbook is provided for attendees and the organizers want a little more information from me about my presentation (i.e., papers, summaries of the talk, etc.). The reason for this is so that attendees can take the information back to their offices and use them as references for future questions that may arise. Also, in many of the distributor and state meetings, the submitted outlines are provided to PCOs so they can take notes.

I find writing these outlines an interesting task. It may be a little time consuming for me, but then again most of us who do this for a living have numerous topics and outlines to draw from. But in many cases I feel it is a waste of my time because most of the people attending never crack the book, look at the outline or even attempt to take notes. In other words they’re saying, "I attended, give me the recertification points and let me out of here!"

A LOST ART. When I was going to school, I had to take notes, record tapes of the sessions and basically do whatever it took to learn the information. If not, I never would have made it through the tests, or for that matter, retained much information at all. Note taking and studying those notes were necessary to learn the topic, or at least understand the presentation. So where does that leave us as "professionals"?

As the Industry Awareness Council campaign gets cranked up, I wonder if homeowners (our potential customers) will start asking more questions of us. I believe that in most circumstances we won’t have to face that scenario very often — although I do believe when it happens we will see the shortcomings from the training we are providing. I get plenty of phone calls from consumers who have met with PCOs, sales professionals and technicians who have made some "off the wall" statements. I realize that some of their stories may be exaggerated, but you have to wonder where people are getting the information to make such statements.

INSTITUTE REQUIREMENTS. Here is my suggestion for the future (whatever that may be). If state regulators and PCOs are really interested in developing recertification programs of merit, they should have required curriculums that must be met for state associations or anyone offering "training." (This was tried years ago and was dropped from consideration.) A new program would provide an outline topic and information needed to be covered by the speaker. There would also be some sort of testing or review of each topic. Essentially this will shorten the amount of information covered by a speaker in an hour and provide more quality information and perhaps more ingenious presentation methods for the audience.

What would go into these programs? Let’s look at a topic that will probably be important in the near future — Integrated Pest Management (IPM). I recently asked a state regulatory official what constituted an "approved" IPM training program. They replied, "Well, we don’t really have any set criteria, but the program being done today would have qualified." There are several aspects of this statement that interest me. First, if there are going to be requirements to train people in IPM, then a committee, a person or someone has to identify the subject matter. Next, who approves the program? Also, who decides whether it is a good or bad program? I should add here that in my home state of Virginia, they are going to give more credit hours to programs promoting IPM than ones that do not!

This leads me to my next question. What is the difference between an "IPM" program and any other program presented in the meeting season? IPM presentations should include safety, pest ID, sanitation, pesticide use, inspection needs, exclusion methods, new product discussions, regulatory requirements, record keeping and other discussions. So, to put it bluntly, what have we been doing so far?

WHAT DOES IPM INCLUDE? Any IPM curriculum has to include all of the afore-mentioned topics because many of the people who will be performing IPM programs have never handled a sticky trap, a Ketch-All™ or a bait gun so we are starting from scratch. The reason I say this is because one of the IPM efforts, especially in schools, is training janitorial, maintenance and kitchen staff to do things like trap, inspect and, yes, even bait. I hope it would also be the desire of the state regulatory people to have these people trained.

So how many hours do you think it would take to train someone in IPM and how many hours do you think they would need to keep their certification? If we instituted the guidelines I stated previously, the amount of time may be lengthened because of review and testing requirements. But there are also a lot of programs that have to be developed. I’m sorry, but you cannot hand someone a book titled, "IPM In Commercial Buildings" and expect them to become self-taught. It doesn’t work. If it did work, we wouldn’t need recertification programs and very few people would attend meetings — just imagine what the industry would be like then!

Curriculum development has to be a cooperative effort, including regulatory and state associations, public interest groups (at least for IPM) and educators. Trying to cram a broad topic into an hour presentation must be discouraged. We should be providing quality training rather than quantity training. The quantity will come over time — the quality has to be there from the beginning.

With the various training aids currently available, presentations are becoming at least a little more agreeable to view. Computers have enabled us to do a lot of things to make presentations visually appealing. But this industry deals in brass tacks, hands-on, in-your-face information like the kind presented by Fred Whitford of Purdue University. Somehow we have to get that across. I like to see people writ-ing something down, although I have been fooled when I find out they are just doodling or playing tic-tac-toe with a friend.

Speakers can usually spot the person who is just there for the day. They come in late, get up during the talks, do not turn off their pagers or phones and, of course, there are those who nap during the presentations. Naturally, as a speaker, my challenge is to keep you interested in what I’m talking about. But my challenge to you is this — you must be interested in what I’m talking about!