yesterday, i ran a small training session for one of my clients. the task was to prime the group on how to embrace wordpress as a dashboard for building out a website design i had completed. as always, there were minor technical difficulties. the big thing for me was that i took a different approach than i had in the past — less canned, overly-structured and less of me doing the leading. i also focused more on general concepts and drawing parallels, and less on the specifics of an already easy to use technology. a few things had happened just before the session, which had sent my mind into a spin, but i think it will prove productive in the near term. click on for some tips on better training sessions.
1. the key is their learning
most people learn from asking questions and understanding answers. if you’re using a canned presentation of any kind, then you should reconsider that decision. in that model, you’re doing all the talking and making assumptions about how people learn. you can’t afford to fall into that trap.
2. interactive
no, i don’t mean that you need to run a laser lights show during the session. you don’t even need a laptop, clicker, pointer or anything like that. the most important thing is to announce that questions are the most important thing to cover, not your topics or slides. conversation is extremely valuable in that you can work out misunderstandings and not have people leave as in the dark (or more) than where they started. i’ve always found it weird when trainers start by announcing to the audience that they will “leave some time at the end for questions,” when the only way to ensure understanding is to engage in short conversations and match questions to answers. that is your greatest value to the audience!
3. concepts first
i think it’s best to start broadly and draw parallels to help the group understand the general playing field. some will resist this at first – because it is a different approach than most – but it will help the entire group in the end. people learn best from trying something themselves. if this is true, then the best thing you can provide during the training is a general framework that will guide them as they attempt to tackle the tasks on their own later.
4. clock irrelevant
this will seem odd to some, and this tip won’t work well for a large seminar or workshop type setting. if you have a small group, then take a new approach to time management. if someone has opted or is required to learn something from a training, then the learning matters most. the idea of looking at how much time a group has to commit for a day and then making certain to cover everything in that session usually leaves the group to picking up a little something on a variety of subjects but perhaps nothing of any real import on the core tasks. try going in a logical order from concepts to specific topics and getting as far as you can in the scheduled time. as long as you’re interacting, answering questions and closing doors as you go along, then the truth is that learning takes as long as it takes. you can set up subsequent sessions to continue where you left off.
5. recap at the end
at the end of each session, or at the close of an all-in-one session, make sure you summarize the key concepts and topics. make sure that any doors that were previously open have now been closed. people are still going to lose some information, but this provides at least a fighting chance at real retention. otherwise, things tend to quickly leave our brains.
