I’ve always been as passionate about training as I have about media.  Which is why I get worried when I hear more and more stories about trainers who confidently peddle second rate media training like snakeskin salesmen of yesteryear. 

Firstly, not anyone can teach
My first worry – and we can talk more about this another time – is that a lot of media people think they can easily become a trainer.  While some can become trainers without too much effort, many unfortunately cannot.  Because training and learning is a science, not something you can just wing. 

To constantly deliver good training, you have to understand things like curriculum and the grammar it conforms to, how different people learn, how to construct learning methodologies that play into different learning styles, and the importance of people being able to transfer learning into everyday skills. 

There are volumes of credible academic research that take the discipline of skills training from a quack’s line-of-work that anyone can try, to a professional field.  But hey, as I said, we’ll talk about that later.

Secondly, the world has changed ... in case you've been asleep
My second worry is that a lot of media trainers are failing to see the changes taking place in their industry.  This came to light over a pint of beer I had with a terrific television trainer in my old local pub in London. 

This trainer was approached by a media training company to deliver editing and camera training for some magazines making the transition to multimedia. 

The woman who ran the company was an accomplished media professional who had worked in traditional media. 

She had never created any websites and didn’t profess to understand interactivity or social media.  But she was delivering training in how to make web video and audio.  “Because I’m an audio and video professional,” she said.

My mate asked her how she approached the teaching of Web video.  “Oh it’s just like teaching television,” she said. 

Believe it or not, web video is differnet to television
Anyone who thinks web video is like television probably belives we're not in a worldwide recession right now.

“But Web video is not television,” my friend said.  “It’s a new medium.”  She objected, probably because she didn’t realize how different they are. 

(Of course I could list the differences in terms of production, distribution and how people view Web video right now.  But I’m not going to list the differences because that’s not the point of this post.) 

The Media is up for grabs
My point is that a lot of media trainers don’t get the fact that the media world is changing.  And the world we’ve been comfortably working in over the past few decades is changing radically.  So much so that the future of media and content is up for grabs.   Anyone who sees web video as television is seriously out of date.  And has seriously misunderstood what’s going on.

Marshual MacCluan was said to have said in the 1950s that television as a maturing medium was driving forward looking in the rear vision mirror.  He was referring to how TV producers back then were still thinking in terms of stage productions when television enabled producers to do so much more than point a camera at some activity on a stage.

A lot of media trainers are teaching future talent to look in the rear vision rather than go out and create the future.  They’re teaching television production methods that will very soon be out of date.  What works on TV does not necessarily work on a computer screen.  Or a cell phone screen.  And these changes are happening so fast that there are no guidelines, no set practices to follow. 

We're writing the rule book ... now
There is currently no rule book.  We’re writing the rule book for our media future now.  Well most of us are except those being hoodwinked into learning the old rules that worked when there were only four TV channels and you could safely rely on someone watching for more than 90 seconds.

There’s nothing wrong with learning traditional production and editorial rules if you test them against the dimensions of new media.  Because so much of what we’ve learned can inform what we do next and save us time and energy, allowing us to focus it on new ideas.  But the future is about tomorrow, not yesterday.

I shouldn’t get worried about trainers teaching new media out of the traditional media rule book.  It’s good for my business, right?  I can offer truly competitive training?  No it’s not.  These trainers are bad for media training in general because they slow down development and give the rest of us a bad name.

Creating the future is what media training must be about today and especially this year as we chart our way through an uncertain future.  And that should involve teaching principles, identifying trends and exercising critical reflection into where the media is going.  Not teaching what worked yesterday.