3 Favorite Training Tips You Can Implement Right Now

Well-trained learners are happy, engaged and productive. But sometimes things come up in training that can prevent participants from learning. We picked a few of our favorite training tips that are effective and easy to implement. Use these in your next training to engage your participants and overcome some of the obstacles that are often associated with adult learners.

1. Visual Aids. Visual aids not only help learners understand concepts faster, but you can minimize language, time and space barriers by incorporating the appropriate visuals into your training. Take a look at your instructional design and when you notice the points where talking is a necessity, use a visual to help keep attention.

Some best practices to keep in mind when using visuals:

• Limit each of your visuals to one idea. If you have complex or difficult concepts, build on the idea with new slides and screens.
• Choose your words carefully. Most visuals are too text heavy, which creates competition with you and makes it difficult for your learners to read and comprehend.
• Think about the text and typeface. Pay attention to the size of text in relation to the size of the visual. Make sure to include white space. Also, the color and font of your text can play a large role in how easy or hard your visual is to read and understand.
• Visuals don’t always have to be words and numbers. Use graphs, charts, illustrations and pictures when possible.

2. Give Participants Choice. As a human, you like to feel that you have total control over your life. By making your own decisions, you automatically feel like you are in control.

Try providing multiple options for activities or exercises and let your learners choose for themselves. It can be as simple as the color of marker they write with to the case study they read. Not only does this give them the chance to choose something on their own, but it also creates more of a personal environment. Not to mention it’s practically impossible to develop an activity or exercise that is exciting to every single participant you are training.

3. Stop Sidebar Conversations. Learner focus is crucial to achieve the objectives and goals of any presentation or class. Of course, it can be challenging to control every learner’s attention with so many potential distractions.

One common distraction is the sidebar conversation. Stop these off-topic conversations and regain attention by moving near the chatting participants and continue to deliver your content. The best part about this technique is that the other people in the room will focus on both you and the offending participants, which will make them self-conscious about their actions and hopefully stop them from committing the classroom crime again.

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