In conversation with Marc Michault, Technologist

Last year we were asked for some Technical Windows 11 training by a client, they had some specifics and had chosen an outline from a competitor called Windows 11 Overview for the IT Professional.

As part of my search I went to some well-known and prestigious trainers and I was recommended to Marc. So now he has done a fabulous job for us and I wanted to showcase his skills and background.

Marc has been presenting and explaining Microsoft enterprise technologies for over twenty-five years, I have had the opportunity to demonstrate and implement Microsoft’s latest enterprise technologies for small to large enterprises. One of his most enjoyable activities has been to ensure the technical readiness of Microsoft Partners on upcoming solutions, in collaboration with different Microsoft subsidiaries. Certified at the expert level on three (Azure, Cybersecurity and Microsoft 365) of the five technology pillars of Microsoft

Question 1:

How did you get into Training and in particular Technical training?

Well, I discovered computers in university while pursuing a degree in biochemistry. It became apparent that organic chemistry and I were not made for each other… At the time, computers were still rather new and something universities sometimes had only included in their curriculum in the last decade, so those of us who took a computer course at my first university felt like a little “clique”. When I transferred to a university in Boston, they offered the possibility for students to deliver classes as part of their “Experimental College”. I offered to deliver an introductory course in Pascal programming, it was accepted and validated for credits toward a bachelor’s degree. So that was my first experience in delivering technical training.

I should have remembered the enjoyment that came of it, but upon graduating I took a technical sales position with Xerox in Washington, DC and then returned to Switzerland to start a distributor outfit with a former boarding school roommate. We worked like mad and for a few years were moderately successful, but could not compete with larger, better funded distributors. I then decided to return to my love of technology and decide to obtain the Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSE) certification.

While pursuing that certification, one of the instructors for the next batch of students was unavailable and the training centre asked me if I could cover for him for one afternoon (Yeap, the universe was rather unsubtle in pointing me in the right direction!), as I was the only student that had already certified on the topic. Following that experience, I invited one of my Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCT) for lunch and he told me everything about the Microsoft training program, thus creating a future competitor! . (Joke aside, MCTs tend to cooperate very much among themselves and share their knowledge and experience freely).

I used to think that a job was something where you would be bored for twenty days of the month in order to get your salary at the end of it, and that people saying “I love my job!” (A common utterance among Americans) were liars. Yet when I started, I sometimes would laugh alone at my good fortune and to this day I am still excited the first day of class, wondering who my students will be and how the course will run!

Question 2.

You call yourself a technologist, what does that mean to you?

Aha! That is the privilege you get from being independent: You can create your own title! Actually, it is just a title I came up with because it can mean pretty much anything: I work on technologies, but that can mean crimping ethernet cables as well as devising a cybersecurity plan for a company. The same privilege also allows me to write my own bio for conferences I present at!

Question 3

I know you have worked in the US in Redmond for Microsoft. And you live in Switzerland. What differences do you see in the US, Europe and the UK in terms of how tech is used?

Well, you have to understand that I have now worked out of Switzerland for over thirty years and the jobs I held in the US where unrelated to Microsoft. There are indeed cultural differences between the different countries, and I would say that some of the clichés are sometimes true. In IT, novelties and improvements often come from the US and are then adopted in Europe, where we are sometimes more circumspect.

I have rarely worked in the UK (to my regret), but from my exchange with UK colleagues, I feel that the trainers there are often not appreciated at their true value (or paid their worth…), with a lot of training centres seeing them as merely resources and going through brokers. That is one of the reasons I enjoy working with Merrill Consultants so much, as the relationship is much more one of trust and you are trainers yourselves.

Question 4

Where do you see technical training going over the next few years with the huge AI influence?

Ah, that is a great and important question. First, let us talk about the changes that have occurred in our industry in the past decade and more recently during the pandemic, which might actually have been more consequential.

The primary change in the last decade (actually, even before then…) has been the move of a lot of content to the Internet: Geeks used to buy a lot of books, and I remember my own favourite IT bookstore in Geneva. Self-learning has moved to websites, which have allowed different media to be incorporated, and thus enabled a better learning experience: You cannot include a video inside a book’s pages ☹.

So, we saw universities publish huge amount of high-quality content as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and then everyone became a presenter on platforms such as YouTube. That means we have some truly excellent content (I love keeping up with Microsoft advances on Microsoft Mechanics and when I grow up, I want to become John Savill!), but we are also drowning in mediocre content, which we have to shift through to find that nugget that will be worth our while…

On the other side of self-learning, the instructor-led training saw its most significant change with the pandemic. A number of institutions had already dipped into distance learning, but the lockdowns required all training centres to develop a distance learning platform in a matter of weeks, if not days. Emergencies never make for the best thought-out plans, and we are still suffering from some of the choices made in those early days of 2020.

In particular, training centres simply displaced their existing courses to online platforms in the same format, namely a nine to five course, instead of making use of the flexibility offered by distance learning, such as multi-modal or non-linear deliveries, despite that model of mixed-media being vigorously debated even before the pandemic and some pilot programs being made available (such as Microsoft Online Courses – MOLC).

The first distance learning I organized for Microsoft Partners, years before the pandemic, was broken into two hours sessions every second day, over a period of multiple weeks, instead of a single week and with the students doing the labs on their own, with support and Q&A via a SharePoint site. At the time, I did not make use of videos to be viewed between sessions, but it is something that would absolutely be included in a multi-modal, non-linear delivery today.

Let us be clear: If keeping to a nine-to-five format, in-person deliveries are vastly superior to distance learning (hybrid, where both in-person and remote participants join the course is even worse). I am confounded that as most organisations are revisiting their work-from-home policies and requiring their employees to return to the office despite the added cost, because of the increased productivity, that discussion is not taking place in the training sector, despite the benefits being even more evident!

That being said, I am not saying that distance learning is not a valuable tool. Only that it loses its value if simply delivered in the same format as an in-person course, without taking advantage of its flexibility and integrating additional content (videos, labs, etc…) and tools (assessments, student progress tracking, etc…) between sessions.

Now, let us come back to the crux of your question: The impact of artificial intelligence on technical training. Of course, artificial intelligence is already being used to create, improve and especially translate content. However, discussions are taking place about what other innovations artificial intelligence will bring to technical learning.

Currently, the discussion seems to be on tools that will augment the trainer during classes, in particular in distance learning. Think of bots handling some of the participants queries, from the mundane “can you repeat that” to the more complex “give me an example” or “would this work with…”. While I have participated in a couple of those discussions with Microsoft, my concern remains that we need to cover the basics (content quality, clarity of content, etc…) beforehand, because a cool tool will not fix suboptimal courseware.

Others envision a “Max Headroom” type of interactive bot that would simply replace a human trainer. That is science-fiction and in my view not something we need to worry about for another decade, if ever (and I am among those that believe that artificial intelligence has the potential to radically alter society, its norms and meaning, more so than anything in the past!).

In my opinion, self-learning will be the first form of content that will benefit from artificial intelligence. It will bring the interactivity lacking from that medium and will permit to adapt/customize a static content to the individual learner. To be truly useful though, it will need to be able to access much more data about the learner’s experience. So maybe in the beginning, it will base its recommendations on our results in an assessment or the interaction we have with a learning bot, but we might come to a point where it will look at a learner’s body language to adapt the delivery to the learner’s needs, in the same way a human trainer already does. Yet, that will raise privacy concerns.

In other words, to my fellow trainers that worry about losing their job to ChatGPT or a Learning Copilot, I feel we will have time and will see it coming ahead of time. In conclusion, I will repeat what Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia said: “You will not lose your job to AI, but to someone who uses AI!”