Plagiarism in Training

There is a lot that is said about this topic however it is one of the most prevalent problems in the training and development industry. Plagiarism, according to Wikipedia is "the practice of claiming or implying original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else's written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one's own without adequate acknowledgement." As trainers or people from the training development field this is something we see or practice and choose to ignore. Well this statement may hurt but it is the truth. On a daily basis millions of power points and loads of information is copied from the internet and used without proper acknowledgement to the creator. By changing the back ground and font style one does not start ownership does not change.

We think it is ok and no one would notice but we forget it is as bad as stealing or shoplifting something and thinking it is not a crime because someone dint catch you in the act. A lot of organizations don’t have adequate checks to make sure that the training material that they use is authentic or not. Sometimes this may happen due to plan ignorance but it still does not change the fact that it is unethical and unprofessional to use information without giving the appropriate person due credit.
I don’t advocate that you need to create or reinvent the wheel however whenever we use information created by others then it is important that we acknowledgement that work. There are lot of ways one can avoid plagiarism some of them are as below

1. Make sure you have provided the source of the information that you have used.
2. If the material is from a particular person then mention the person’s name at the end in the reference section
3. If one is inspired by a particular article but have a individual perspective of the information it is important that you rewrite the information in your own words and give the original idea credit in the reference section of your work.
4. Photos and images should not be copied without prior permission.

All these steps are simple and easy to follow and make take a little extra time. However in the long run it will help you make sure that you do not plagiarize.