Working with SME's

Working with various subject matter experts (SMEs) involves a lot of give and take, particularly when it's design-by-committee. I experienced this for the first time when I worked in the military on a medical training project when dealing with Medical professionals and SME’s.

I suspect that in every job that such work will involve much the same sort of give and take. So far, my professional work has been project-specific site-building and help sorts of things, I have even experience a number of full-fledged start-to-finish TD projects for some large government organisations.

The Training Designers’ life is a busy one. For us, it's on-the-fly client/stakeholder advisement and support, development meetings, building instructor-led courses, developing websites, conducting research, making presentations (often to a sceptical audience), and any number of other tasks.

Who is to say how a muse works, but I find a compelling need to write about subject matter experts or SMEs today. Certainly, I've worked with a number of SMEs in my career to date. Most of my colleagues are SMEs in their fields and often in a number of related fields. I had a boss once who thought he was a SME on everything, since he was called on by other organisations to speak on just about every subject. I had some trainees who were SMEs in the most unusual fields (scuba diving on oil rigs, pilots, living out in the wilds of Africa, stealing sound systems out of cars, and working as miners). And of course, I've run into all sorts of people who thought they were SMEs but had some pretty outlandish observations about their chosen fields.

TDs work with SMEs in all sorts of areas, and it's always a nuanced balance between fully listening and following the SME's ideas (brilliance and folly) and inserting the self.

Being the perennial non-expert in the room requires major humility. It means that one has to be the listening and recording ears and eyes. And yet, there are times when insights about learning and the technologies and more up-to-date ways of doing/being will come into play, and the TD has to speak up. After all, that's what the TD is paid for! This must be done with diplomacy and care, of course, when possible, and a little more passion if the first isn't possible. And if all is lost, well, sometimes noisy and constructive conferencing may be an option.

To borrow a colleague’s slip of the tongue, to not go forward with some caution would land one into "The Big Soup of the Not Good." I haven't done that yet. I'm pretty sure I will at some point. Meanwhile, I'm here to help with training development and to spice up my professional life along the way.