gary

I haven’t looked at Workato Academy in a long time, so I don’t have direct feedback. However, I can say my preferred way of learning is by getting information fast first, and detailed second. I have a short attention span and even less patience (thanks, social media). If I see a wall of text or a video that is longer than five minutes, the likeliness of me getting through it is close to zero. This is usually because I have no idea if the content is actually going to teach me something or help me solve an issue, but it’s still asking for a decent time commitment. If a long video started with a 30-60 speed-run recap of everything I’m going to get out of the video (course, session, etc.), the chances of a full viewing drastically increase. First, it acts as a table of contents for the longer content, allowing me to answer: Is this actually addressing what I need? It also gives me the opportunity to assess the content: Is it clear and well-made? This is generally my approach to any training I perform. I always start with a recap of the full process, the starting point, major milestones, and finish line. Zero fluff. Once everyone is oriented, I double back and walk through each part of the process in more detail. I guess it’s a lot like social media. Take two YouTube creators: One creator makes a 30-minute video about making pancakes. Another creator makes a 90-second short with the same information. Which video will you watch? If I’m standing at the stove with a hot griddle, there’s only one answer. If I somehow make burnt frisbees, I’ll probably sit down later and watch the 30-minute video to see where I went wrong. But, honestly, even then probably not the full 30 minutes. I wouldn’t call myself an instructional designer, but I have worked in a few LMS’ and created close to a gajillion training videos and courses.

This is a huge update! Being totally honest, it’s a bit overdue… but it’s finally arrived! In the past decade I’ve probably come up with a hundred different ways for logging and troubleshooting loops, all of which were a pain to set up, and none of which would ever be as efficient as doing it natively in the job. This looks like a really slick way to do it. I can’t tell from the docs page, but I’m hoping you can manually type in an iteration number as well, because clicking through a hundred loops would be pretty rough. (On that note, I’m begging you, please fix this on the jobs page too. If I wanted to jump to, say, page 10 of jobs, I need to click all the way to page 10. If I had to get to page 100, forget it! You can’t even cheat the URL manually because the pagination offset is based on the job ID.) Back to loops: I’m happy to see it’s also applied to fallbacks and errors, as those details can also get lost quickly. Very cool. And now the most important question: is it available? I checked multiple tenants and don’t see it in the job view yet.

Aaron W. in truth, it wasn’t me. We’ve had some developer-builders who found it hard to break away from “coding”. Their approach to recipes was writing a giant script to do everything in a single action — the exact opposite of how to approach things in Workato!

Jen M.! DCC fan? 😄