Strong Tech Sector Helps Market Rebound!
A roadmap to this seasons Tech programs
BY LANE MCLAUGHLIN PSIA-NW TECH VP

So, that’s my prediction for 2006, a healthy and vibrant Tech sector leads a charge and turns a slumping market into a bullish run and big gains for the year. But before you run out to your stock broker and gobble up a bunch of options on high flying internet companies, you better hear me out because I’m actually talking about our snowsports community and the role I see the Tech Team, Divisional Clinic Leaders (DCLs), and Training Directors (TDs) playing in helping us rebound from a rough 2005.

I don’t know if I’ve heard anybody talk about skiing in the last 8 months without prefacing whatever they say with a reference to how lousy last season was. In our land of prodigious precip’, Northwesterners just don’t know how to live on the starvation diet of snow we were fed last year. Last season has left us weak and hungry and hung-over. But just when everybody is ready to sell short, I’ll go with the contrarians and buy long. I believe we’re going to have a rebound season, hopefully in snow but more predictably in participation, leadership, and productivity in our Technical program.

PSIA-NW Mission Statement:

Provide high quality educational resources and well defined standards to aid our members in improving their teaching skills to better satisfy the needs and expectations of their customer in the enjoyment of downhill and nordic snowsports.

Last season’s Tech training program started strong with effort to address feedback from the membership survey and its measurement of what we’re doing well and not so well with regards to our divisional mission statement. It’s the desire of the Tech staff to answer the call and move forward on the following objectives:

Provide membership value

What was clear to me in the surveys was that a member’s evaluation of membership value and clinic value seemed directly tied to the quality of experience they had with DCLs. Members either raved about experiences with clinic leaders who could really deliver an assigned topic in a fun and memorable way and how the price to access these talented folk is a steal, or members had critique that spoke to just the opposite.

Since your value of membership and participation so tightly hinges on your evaluation of our staff, and that our people are essentially the product, it is our mission to develop a unified staff that is motivated to grow personally and professionally in the process of delivering you a consistent, quality, and inspiring product. The staff realizes that being a clinician is not a status symbol but rather an assignment and opportunity to meet more of you and help with the progress our community is able to make within the industry. They have come up with their own training objectives to help address your feedback and essentially raise the standard for their own participation.

Development of teaching curriculum

The mission states pretty clearly that we’re here to help you with your teaching skills but it is also evident that the majority of our curriculum and clinic activities focus on skiing and riding skills. To me that’s not surprising in that it’s much easier to have a clinic session about skiing and riding be experiential, experimental, and downright epic because participants get to do it, can measure their progress, and leave with new goals.

However, I don’t know that we’ve come up with a similar paradigm on the teaching side – we have plenty of information about teaching and learning theories, best practices, progression development, meeting humanistic needs, and all the ingredients of great teaching but perhaps not an experiential format for people to experiment with the tools and get an understanding of their own abilities and a roadmap for improvement. Most of our teaching on teaching comes through modeling rather than practicing, and some of the learning obstacles come through fear and the lack of risk-taking. Your Tech Team and a PSIA National Task Force are trying to fill this gap and bring you a better balance in curriculum, products, clinics, and activities to train teaching skills. 

Educational information linked to certification standards, and visa versa.

As the mission statement indicates, the organization exists to providemembers with educational products and opportunities and a set of defined standards (i.e., certification) to guide their development. Since your Tech Team, DCLs, and TDs create and present to you these educational components, it’s definitely our goal that the learning and the feedback you get along the way is consistent with and connectable to the certification standards that measure your professional progress. The fact that your TD or clinician may not be an examiner should not be an obstacle to your training toward and meeting national standards.

The worst-case scenario for us is to hear of examples when members perceive the information and experiences between the Education and Certification events as disconnected and not complementing one another. It’s your Tech staff’s goal to make sure your education leads you toward meeting well defined standards and that the pursuit of achieving standards is meaningful and educational to you. To tighten the link between these two programs, your Tech staff spent their training time last year improving how we use the PSIA National Standards as a tool to develop goals, assess performance, and make feedback more meaningful to you. As an example of progress, the Alpine Exam scorecards are being modified to better convey how we measure your strengths and weaknesses in terms of skills rather than tasks.

Jump back in

So, if you’re stuck in a general malaise from ‘Black Season’, we want you to step away from the ledge and jump back into the game. I’ve only touched on some of the highlights where your Tech crew is most committed and have excluded many other areas of hard work improving curriculum, event quality, communications, and the overall membership experience.

Come sign up and enjoy group therapy to blast away the blues from a well-intended but short-lived season. This season will include tryouts for Alpine and Snowboard DCL staffs, ACE staff, and Alpine Tech Team – it’s a season where the Tech sector is going to be pushing hard to earn their role as your educational and certification leaders. You get the final say on how we’re doing, so check your calendar, plug into your community, and provide us feedback on where to go next and we’ll team up to enjoy a rebound season.

Timberline training snow, rain or shine! Nov. 19th and 20th. Updates on line, check TD News.