Training – Three Thoughts in Thinking Through Your Training
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Any training session requires a lot of advance preparation, of course: planning the content, structuring the flow of the course, preparing any pertinent visuals. Here are three thoughts to keep in mind while you’re in that planning stage…
1. Create Some Kind Of Handout Or Takeaway. It’s been well established in learning research that people learn better if they can both hear and see the information. It’s the rationale often used behind having lots of visuals (which may be a valid reason, but doesn’t excuse the overuse and abuse of PowerPoint…). But with or without a visual, consider the importance and value of a handout of some sort. At the very least, a summary or tip sheet makes a great takeaway.
But if your training session is complex or long, a workbook or multi-page handout is essential. At the very least, it gives attendees a way to follow along and stay with you. It is also a help to you, of course, allowing you to stay on track and not have to worry about forgetting any information. It can be a crucial part of the learning process if participants use it to take notes or fill in the blanks. It’s also a great takeaway that they can always refer to later as a reminder to reinforce key points. And finally, particularly if you are an outside training vendor brought in to the organization, a handout is essentially a business card. With your name and contact information prominent on a title page and/or as a footer on every page, you increase your brand exposure and up the odds that someone someday will pull out that notebook, remember you and your training, and give you a call for some future business.
Make sure you design this handout or workbook professionally. Either hire someone with some graphic design skills or use Word or Publisher or some other word processing program that allows you to select and vary fonts, type sizes, spacing, and clean simple design elements. Don’t “over-design” it, but don’t make the pages all look like they came out of a college term paper!
2. Time Your Session And Rehearse. You never want to go over your time allotment for the class (see #3), but you also don’t want participants to leave feeling like some crucial information was omitted. Time your agenda to cover all the key points. Rehearse it before you ever do it for the first time. If you’re doing exercises, you need to replicate those with some friends or colleagues to get a good idea of how long they’ll take with group interaction.
Then include a built-in cushion to allow for the inevitable questions and discussion. Allow for about 20% of your total time to be a cushion. So if your session is supposed to be a half-day program (4 hours), your rehearsal of it, including any exercises, should come out to about three and a quarter hours. That 45-minute cushion is to allow for questions, discussion, give and take. But if you get more class questions and discussion than you anticipated, and realize you’re running tight on time, then you need to have a plan for what you can afford to eliminate. Always know what you’ll leave out at the last minute without having to sacrifice any key ideas, so you can stay on time. Consider those activities that generally eat up time: showing PowerPoint slides; writing on a flip chart or whiteboard; telling a long story or anecdote; and doing class exercises.
3. Start And End On Time. This is the most basic of training rules, yet one of the most violated. Many trainers want to wait until “everybody gets here” before they start. In that case, you are essentially punishing those who arrived on time and rewarding those who are late. However, a “rush hour” allowance may be appropriate, but only if the attendees present agree to it. The criteria to factor in when deciding on a later start: (a) less than half the group is present (so several late entries could be distracting and disrupt the session), (b) the information at the start is important enough that if half the class misses it, it will affect the flow and value of the program, (c) the class attendees are polled on this and give their approval to delay the start, and (d) you have a cushion built in (see #2) so that starting late does not mean ending late.
When latecomers do arrive, never repeat what you’ve covered so far for their benefit. Let them catch up from others or from you on a break.
Never end late. But if you can let them out earlier than they’re anticipating, you will be a hero!
Barbara Busey has had her own training business since 1990 and developed her own proprietary presentation skills program, The Compelling Speaker. She now offers the Compelling Speaker Certification, a turnkey system — complete with training content & technique, business strategies, and marketing guidelines — that positions communicators to make a living training other business professionals to become more compelling speakers. Go to http://www.compellingspeakercertification.com to learn more about this unique business opportunity and sign up for the special report, “Do You Have What it Takes to Run Your Own Training Business?”
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