Training & Development For Dummies

Thomas Edison once said that he had never worked a day in his life. It was all fun! Adding humor to your training is one way you can add fun to your participants’ days (and have fun yourself). People should love their jobs so much that they get up and go to play each day. Learning should be like that, and people seem to learn more when they are having a good time.

Small groups are critical to a well-designed training program. They are one of the best ways of promoting involvement and participation. The value of small-group activities include the following: Small groups provide an opportunity for more people to have more “air time” to express opinions, add ideas, and ask questions.

Everyone makes mistakes, but some are bigger than others. When you are training your employees, your mistakes can make the difference between business success and failure. Steer clear of committing these sins: Starting late and wasting time Being poorly prepared and lacking content knowledge Displaying distracting habits Ignoring participants’ needs and interrupting their questions Lacking enthusiasm Reading from a script Neglecting to tell participants WIIFM (“what’s in it for me?

Have you ever wondered why you spent the time to train your employees, but they still don’t seem to do what you trained them to? Include this 12-pack of good ideas in your training, and you can guarantee success. Be prepared. State the objectives. Be organized. Use visuals. Answer questions. Be enthusiastic.

There are hundreds of alternative methods you can use to replace a presentation. Recognize that many of these methods usually take longer than a lecturette, but a well-constructed activity enhances learning because the participant experiences the learning by being personally involved. Why would you use an activity anyway?

Trainers are most successful when they understand conditions under which adults learn best. Therefore, it is important to understand the difference between why adults learn and how adults are traditionally taught. The traditional style of teaching is based on a didactic model, a synonym for lecturing. Generally this model is teacher-led and content-centered.

New trainers sometimes question the difference between the training and facilitating roles when implementing the training design. In The Winning Trainer, Julius E. Eitington defines them as follows: Trainer: Term used to describe a learner-centered conductor of a course or program. See also Facilitator. Facilitator: A trainer who functions in a way to allow participants to assume responsibility for their own learning.

Blended learning is the combination of various learning technologies. It is most effective when the best technology is matched with the content and with the learner’s needs and availability. It is a natural evolution of e-learning that includes web-based training, CD-ROM courses, videos, webinars, EPSS systems, and simulations.

Research into how the brain works best has received lots of publicity recently. Brain imaging has given researchers the ability to see the brain as learning occurs. Even though cognitive neuroscience appears to be a hot topic, it is really confirming what Malcolm Knowles, Howard Gardner, Robert Gagne, and others determined decades ago: Adult learning principles are important.

If you really want your training to take hold and be retained, you need to have effective visuals. Visuals must enhance — not detract from — your training delivery. Be sure that you follow the VISUAL laws. Visible: Words on visuals are large enough, and you don’t block the view. Interesting: Oriented to the learner, visuals make use of pictures, graphs, color, and bullets.

Learning management systems (LMS) maintain a record of all training and development activities. The two primary types of LMS programs for purchase usually base pricing either on how many learners you have or how much content you have. If you have 1,000 learners with only a ten-minute video to watch and track, you would want to pursue an LMS that charges by how much content you post, not by how many logins are recorded.

As a trainer, be sensitive to the mood of your classroom — created by both the physical aspects as well as each participant's demeanor. To create a comfortable environment, consider these before your next training session: In a traditional classroom Turn the lights on bright. There is nothing more depressing to me than walking into a ballroom where the lights have been left on romantic dim from the party the night before.

It would be great if everything you did as a trainer went just the way it is supposed to, but it won't. Some learners may arrive thinking that training is punishment. Others may arrive with memories of past learning experiences in mind, such as a boring webinar or failing tests. Yet others may arrive bringing their daily burdens with them.

Although training may seem like a glamorous profession to an observer, like any other profession, it has its hidden challenges. Having the skills to be a trainer is only one prerequisite. A much more difficult requirement for a successful trainer is to have strong mental and emotional composure. Training is a demanding profession.

Before you or your organization venture into the virtual world of delivering learning solutions, you will want to explore both the advantages and disadvantages of e-learning. Benefits of e-learning Some of the obvious benefits of e-learning include worldwide access to the materials and trainers without the need to put learners on planes or even leave their desks in some cases.

Engagement in a webinar? Yep. It's probably more important than in a face-to-face classroom. Your learners will be bombarded by distractions. Here are a few ideas to keep your learners engaged. A rule of thumb is to introduce a change at least every three minutes to maintain your learners' attention: Tell your learners the length of the session and never go longer — never.

There are few times when straight delivery or lecture is required. Perhaps when rules or laws must be imparted word for word, when safety is an issue, or when your learners have no knowledge of the subject. But for the most part facilitating experiential activities and discussions lead to the same end, enhancing learning for everyone.

As a trainer, you are accountable for developing Millennials to take on leadership responsibilities in your organization. This newly defined role is urgent because Generation X is half as large as the current retiring generation, the Baby Boomers. That means, as the Baby Boomers retire, only half of the positions will have experienced workers prepared to replace those who are retiring.

You have many ways to ensure participation in training and development. Mostly it comes down to your reaction to the learners and their learning situation. How do you react to ensure an environment that encourages the best opportunities for participation? How do you react to create the best learning experience?

There are as many paths to a career in training and development as there are types of training. Many trainers can tell you they “came in the back door.” Some are trainers for a while before realizing that training is a profession in its own right. Because training became a collateral duty to the “real” jobs they have, they don't consider that someone may have studied the training process to ensure effectiveness!

Like your sightseeing tour, a trainer wants to get the most bang for the buck. That means conducting a needs assessment and analyzing the data. What’s the root cause of the problem? Is training even the issue? The figure highlights the first stage of The Training Cycle. Stage I of The Training Cycle: Assess and Analyze Needs.

Even if you have never trained a day in your life, you have already developed a training style. Like everyone, you have developed preferences in life. How you give directions to strangers. How you explain a task to colleagues. How you clarify information for your spouse. You have developed a preferred way to do each of these and they provide clues about your training style.

The field is still evolving for the Talent Development profession. This means you will find various definitions for the same tool, delivery mechanism, and even your professional title. Both webinar and virtual ILT classroom reference the online training event itself. Your role title is the facilitator. Here, you examine a few other words and how they define what you will do.

The Training Cycle is so orderly and straightforward, it seems like it would be impossible to miss anything important. That's true, but keep in mind that training is really about the learner. Adults learn differently. Learners have different preferences for recognizing and processing information. If the experts can't arrive at one model for how people learn, how can you be expected to train people with vastly different learning preferences in the same group?

It seems that if anything goes wrong that interferes with conducting the training session, it will have something to do with the equipment. Your media and visual equipment — DVD player, projector, flipcharts — all help participants understand the message faster and easier. But when something goes awry, it can spell disaster.

Preparing your participants for training is tricky. What you think will work to get them involved in the session probably won’t. And what you think may be minimal preparation is perhaps the best thing you can do. Imagine that! As you peruse some of these ideas, remember you’re working with adult learners. Preparing participants: What works?

When your participants walk into the training session, what do you want them to see? Empty boxes turned on end? Chairs awry? Technicians scurrying about trying to get your PowerPoint up and running? Facilities people moving the refreshment table to the back of the room and bringing extra chairs? You running to and fro trying to find missing materials?

Preparation is the key for success in all you do as a trainer. Whether you deliver classroom training or virtual training, develop learners individually or in groups, or are coaching a group or providing feedback to a team, if you are prepared you will deliver a fabulous training. In the case of remote training, preparation becomes even more crucial because all (or most) of your learners are in one location and you are facilitating from a distance.

There are so many things you may think about to facilitate and encourage participation in a training and development session. Don't worry about learning and perfecting all of them. Many of them will become as natural as good communication skills. That's because many are natural. In effect, it comes down to your reaction to the learners and the learning situation.

Your room may have significant impact on your training session. Arrange the room to support the learning objectives and the amount of participation you will desire. Typically you will not have the opportunity to select a room. However, if you do, consider the attributes that will create the best learning environment for your participants.

The platform your organization will use to align and publish e-learning should be determined before you choose an LMS provider. SCORM is the current gold standard, and making sure your LMS can deliver SCORM compliance materials is key. Tin Can is an exciting publishing and data management system that tracks different types of learning opportunities — not just those created and entered into your LMS (one of SCORM’s limitations).

You may decide to purchase off-the-shelf materials instead of designing them yourself. However, you most likely still want to customize them for your ­organization. In that case, ideas throughout this chapter can help you with that task. Will off-the-shelf meet your needs? At first glance, purchasing materials that have already been designed and that are packaged, tested, and ready to implement may appear to be a perfect solution.

Tweet your training? You bet! As social media and smart mobile devices like phones, tablets, and watches firmly establish their place in our society, you can use those resources and let technology make training more effective. Although there are many platforms to distribute the mini-blasts of information to an audience, Twitter is certainly seen as the most mainstream and the system most likely to be approved by your IT team.

There are several free and subscription-based webinars and online presentations software packages. Your IT department will have recommendations and restrictions about the software choice. If your organization already has a system, you will need to learn how to work within the scope of service you have. If your organization allows shareware, free downloads, and has a small audience per program, the world is your oyster.

After you complete the needs assessment, analyze the data, and ascertain the need for training, you develop the objectives for the training. The figure shows that developing objectives is the second stage of The Training Cycle. Stage II of The Training Cycle: Develop Learning Objectives. Learning objectives are written for the learner.

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs as they are commonly called) are focused on the content and are not overly involved or interested in the other aspects of the training design. A SME is brought into the process to provide content knowledge and to ensure that the details are current and accurate. The best SMEs are experts on the topic, and can also communicate the basics that someone new to the job needs to know.

At some point in your career you're likely to find folks who are involved in task analysis. In its simplest form, task analysis breaks a job (task) down into observable steps. It also reveals the knowledge and skills the employee needs to complete each step. At times task analysis may be used to determine training needs.

Get in the habit of practicing a few basic guidelines in every training situation. This ensures that everyone has the same output expectations and will also help remind you of everything that needs to be completed before delivering a virtual session. In fact, it is a great idea to create your own checklist that you can refine after each event.

Anytime you participate in a training program, whether it is in a virtual or a traditional classroom, whether it was off-the-shelf or developed from scratch, whether it was taught by someone inside your organization or an external vendor, whether it was a program teaching management development skills or word processing skills, chances are that the program was designed by following a specific process, or a representative ISD model.

Training has been around since the Stone Age. It's not likely that train-the-trainer seminars existed in 2000 b.c. Yet without some natural way to transfer skills and knowledge, people would never have progressed from the first wheel on a muddy road to the computer chips that guide our exploration of outer space.

Trainers address three types of learning: knowledge (K), skills (S), and influencing attitude (A). Trainers frequently shorten this to the KSA acronym. (If you want the research to support this, it is called Bloom's Taxonomy.) Knowledge (Bloom called this cognitive) involves the development of intellectual skills.

Developing a more effective training session is definitely in your best interest. When designing a training session, ensure that you maximize the learning that occurs by doing the following things: Build in practical, relevant examples. Make it interactive; learning is not passive. Enrich with content; don’t underestimate your learners’ potential.

Creating active and ample participation is the most important thing you can do to enhance learning. Here are a couple of thoughts to get you started whether you are in a virtual or traditional classroom: Use small break-out groups to overcome any reluctance to share ideas or concerns. In a virtual classroom, this means using break-out rooms.

You want your training session to be specific to your goals and provide information that can’t be found in generic training resources. To set your training apart from materials your participants can get online or from a book, be sure to do the following in your training: Create a supportive learning environment.

Remote Instructor-Led Training (RILT), where the learners and the trainer are in different locations, continues to be a more common situation. A company in one country buys a company in another, and the new employees need to get up to speed. An organization implements a new procedure or introduces a new product.

Training and development can be incredibly rewarding, but it is also filled with challenges. This Cheat Sheet aims to cut to the chase in several key areas that trainers deal with all the time. You'll find succinct tips on avoiding pitfalls, designing great visuals, and loads of quick ideas to improve your sessions.

Is it soup yet? Alphabet, that is. If you associate with training types, you may at times think they are speaking in a foreign tongue. Perhaps it is time to introduce a few of the acronyms and technical terms you hear in the training field: Active training: An approach that ensures participants are actively involved in the learning process.

Social media is all the rage. You can use this to your advantage in your training sessions. Web 2.0 technologies have created fast growth in the use of social media tools and social networking activities. For trainers, social media provides information to learners who need it, when they need it, and where they need it.

The trainers’ roles, they are a-changing, and many new roles are currently being defined in the training and development (T&D) arena. The following list provides just a sample of the trainer roles and titles that are emerging. Career coach Chief learning officer Competency expert Computer-based training designer Continuous learning coach Corporate trainer Courseware designers Curriculum development specialist Employee development ­specialist Executive coach Facilitator Global T&D facilitator Instructional designer Instructional technologist Instructor Knowledge manager L&D specialist Leadership trainer Manager of strategic initiatives Media designer Multimedia engineer OD consultant Organizational effectiveness ­specialist Performance analyst Performance consultant Performance technologist Talent development professional Technical trainer Virtual facilitator Workforce diversity director Workplace learning and performance professional Even though the preceding list uses wildly different words and appears to be quite diverse, all of these roles play a part in ensuring that people gain knowledge or skills, or change attitudes.

Training is about change. It is about transformation. It is all about learning. Training is a process designed to assist an individual to learn new skills, knowledge, or attitudes. As a result, individuals make a change or transformation that improves or enhances their performance. These improvements ensure that people and organizations are able to do things better, faster, easier, and with higher quality.

Before you dive in to design and develop the training program, obtain a clear definition of the limitations. Many a training session has been headed in a direction only to learn that resources are not available in the form of time, money, or people. Clarify the limitations first. List all the learning objectives for the session.

Malcolm Knowles is considered the father of adult learning theory. Because pedagogy is defined as the art and science of teaching children, European adult educators coined the word andragogy to identify the growing body of knowledge about adult learning. It was Dr. Knowles’s highly readable book, The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species, published in 1973, that took the topic from theoretical to practical.

As important as it is to determine whether there is a training need, it is equally important to learn as much about your participants as you can. You discover much about your audience in the data-gathering part of your needs assessment. However, in some instances, someone else will have completed the assessment and the analysis.

Why a needs assessment? The ultimate goal of a needs assessment is to determine the current and the desired performance. The difference or the gap between the two is the learning that must occur and the basis for a good training design. Supervisors and managers may approach trainers and request that they conduct training because of some incident that has happened.

Every year, most organizations budget money for training — over $70 billion in the United States and over $130 billion worldwide. The volume of money and effort suggests that corporations believe training is important. What do they know about training that justifies this much investment? For starters, training plays an important role in developing a productive workforce and finely tuning processes to increase profits.