Designing your training is one of the first critical steps in engaging your participants. If you don’t prepare enough or make naïve decisions in designing, you can sabotage your training before you begin. Here are 13 design disasters (plus one) you can avoid just by being aware.
Design Tactics to Avoid:
- Using language that belittles participants or puts on airs. Don’t patronize your participants with remedial information or an attitude that implies you know that you know more than they do. You and the training are to be a resource.
- Designing the training first and then writing the terminal and enabling objectives. Set up your measurable goals first, then your training can help you reach those targets. The training will be much more successful as a performance solution when you start with the end in mind.
- Spending too much time on the nice-to-know versus the need-to-know. Cover the need-to-know and put the nice-to-know in an appendix in case you don’t have enough time to cover it in the time allotted.
- Chunking the content into unmanageable learning portions. Be aware that people remember beginnings and endings more than they remember what you covered in the middle…and if your whole learning portion is a solid two hours, there will be a lot your attendees forget. So have more beginnings and endings—switch up learning portions with stand-up breaks, energizers or other training-related activities.
- Stating objectives of the session and then not meeting them. This can be a career-killer. If you’re going to promise something, you need to make good and deliver. If you raise expectations consistently and fail to meet those, you may find your training sessions shrinking in attendance.
- Not providing a roadmap of where the session is going. Don’t leave participants “hanging.” This goes along with number five—state objectives, inform your participants of what you’ll be covering—and then do it!
- Telling stories that don’t match the message but are your “favorite” and everyone “loves” them. You may do well on Level 1 evaluations, but it’s not helping your attendees in the long run.
- Telling participants what to do versus showing them and allowing them to DO. Most people are kinesthetic learners—we learn by doing. By engaging your participants in the learning, you’re helping cement the material by utilizing more of their five senses and training their muscles to remember what was covered.
- Not building activities that teach your content into the training. A sibling to number eight, the more engaged your participants are, the more they will retain. Lecture just doesn’t cut it. This also ties into number four—more activities help increase retention.
- Creating job aids that are conceptual instead of behavioral. For example, “Susie answered the phone pleasantly” is a concept; it doesn’t specifically convey the results you’re looking for. “Susie answered the phone within 3 rings” lists a specific behavior you want modeled.
- Using a PowerPoint deck as your handout. Handouts should be used to cover material—but also contain additional information. Most participants don’t want you to be reading the handouts word-for-word. They’ll wonder why they needed to attend the session if your handout contains the exact same content.
- Not reviewing or revisiting content throughout the session. Studies have shown that it takes six times of covering material for it to sink in. Only covering material once obviously leaves you very short of your objective—retention.
- Using the same activity multiple times. While repetition can create retention, repetition can also cause boredom. If you need ideas for more training activities, Bob Pike, Lynn Solem and Ed Scannell have several books available on training games, openers, closers and energizers.
- Overusing one form of media (DVDs, gaming, books etc.) “Variety is the spice of life,” it is said. And a variety of media helps create more interest and stirs things up—which, again, helps create retention when participants are willing to sample your recipe for increased job success.
Becky Pike Pluth is president and CEO of The Bob Pike Group and co-author of SCORE 3: Super Closers, Openers, Revisiters, Energizers for Enhanced Training Results.
This article was re-uploaded from our internal archive.
