I have been running tutorials and subbing for teachers of CAD and a few other software packages since high school because it is something I love doing. In China, most of the people I worked with were quite good with CAD programs but were interested in photo management packages. At the time I was testing out the Adobe Lightroom Beta and Apple's Aperture and a member of a Photoshop training team, Jiang, asked me to do a guest lecture on these packages and how they can be used.
My role was to demonstrate the use model and then show some quick work flow techniques.
This was an interesting learning experience because in some ways it failed to work as expected. First of all, I was presenting about 2 Apple-only packages to people who had no interest in ever using Apples and secondly I was speaking about photo management packages to a crowd of people interested in image manipulation and generation in Photoshop. These photo management systems are designed for photographers and studios and all the tools that I was talking about were oriented toward that sort of work flow. I think that the talk I gave was dry and perhaps a bit boring but the real problem was that my audience was interested in something quite different.
At the end of it Jiang came up and said, "I guess I expected something else, but that software seems interesting." What I learnt from this is that it is much more important to know what people are looking for than to do a good job. I also learnt that it is a lot harder to listen to someone speak for a long time when you only understand half the words they are using - not that that is a surprise, but it was the first time that I had talked for an hour and then found that most people were still thinking about the beginning.
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