Corporate training sessions are essential to keep employees’ skills fresh and up to date. This is crucial when the company is introducing changes to working practices, new products or services, or onboarding new staff members. They can also help to keep staff motivated and engaged with their job roles, which in turn leads to better performance and productivity.
Here are some tips to ensure that your training sessions are the most effective and engaging that they can be.
Define the purpose of your training session
It may sound obvious, but pinning down the purpose of your training session and what you want it to achieve can help you plan the event in more detail. It might be beneficial to consult the intended training group and their managers in advance, to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are, and identify any gaps in their knowledge.
This will ensure that your training is relevant and useful, and the delegates will feel that the effort is worthwhile rather than just another burden on their workload.
Set out the learning objectives in advance
Tell all the delegates what they can expect from the training session, either by emailing out the agenda in advance of the date, or setting it out in an introductory talk at the beginning of the event. This helps the trainees mentally prepare and understand what will be expected of them.
If the session will introduce new and particularly complex topics, it may even be helpful to suggest some background information to help the delegates prepare and get more out of the training.
Start with an icebreaker
The training session will be more productive if all the delegates have a chance to get to know each other and establish a rapport before the session begins. Hold a quick icebreaker, such as asking the group to divide into pairs and find out a couple of interesting facts about each other to feed back to the rest of the group.
This helps everyone to get to know each other and feel more comfortable and receptive to the new situation.
Diversify the training styles
Everyone learns in different ways. Avoid designing a whole training session that involves sitting behind a computer screen or taking notes from a speaker. Some people learn better through hand-on activities, so include some practical elements if at all possible.
Other people are visual learners, and will respond well to short videos and infographics. Try to include both audio and visual options for all of the content, and also provide links for reference, so that learners can return to the material and do further research and background reading in their own time.
Ask for participant feedback
It is important to find out what the attendees thought about the event, so that you can use the feedback to improve any future events.
You could email out a survey that asks them to rate each element of the event on a scale from one to five, or ask more open-ended questions about how satisfied they were with the event, what they most and least liked, and so on.
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