As a training professional, where would you start in designing a training session?
It’s worth considering this three-stage model:
The likelihood is you will have a topic, theme or subject for your training session, with possibly one or more objectives.
At this point, as a trainer, often your first thought or question to yourself might be, “I wonder what activities would be useful here?” So, you might start with the activities you want the participants to complete such as a small-group discussion, practical activity, role-play or quiz.
Or, you then think, “Hang on, what is each activity going to achieve?” This might lead you to think about what you want the output of each activity to be: increased knowledge, development of a particular skill or adopting a new tool or technique.
For many trainers, this is where the planning, and subsequent delivery, might stop. But the next question, often missed or ignored, might be the most important of all: “What impact will the new learning have — on the individual, their job or the organization they work for?”
Typically — though not always — the organization requesting the training wants to address, improve, resolve or fix a particular problem such as improving teamwork and cohesion, building personal confidence, increasing organizational capacity, reducing errors or customer complaints and so on.
These are the outcomes wanted by the organization — and the true reason that the training has been requested. The activities might be fun and the training course might increase knowledge, but the bottom line is: Can and will that learning be used outside of the training course to successfully address the reason the training was called for in the first place?
The Disappearing Trick
This process all makes sense, and yet it is not often what happens in reality, for two reasons: ease and awareness.
Ease
When a trainer starts to develop their session, their natural inclination is to focus on their own skills and interests. They will all have a training portfolio, a warehouse of scores of activities, which they know how to run and often enjoy delivering. The core competence of a trainer is … well, training. So, it’s hard to avoid thinking first of activities, especially ones they prefer. And any good trainer will then consider the learning purpose of any activity: What will the learner learn? And that deals with the second box: What will the learning outputs be? That’s where many trainers will stop — each learning activity leading to a learned output. Learning as a means to a learned end.
But many trainers find it harder to identify the actual organizational outcomes the learning is meant to deliver. So, for most trainers, choosing activities is easy and so is identifying relevant learning outputs. But connecting such outputs to desired outcomes may be extremely difficult, especially if they are not known!
Awareness
The trainer and the participants are very aware of every activity they are engaged in; that’s usually where the day is spent — in activity after activity. As for outputs — that’s much more variable. Ideally, the outputs for each activity are identified, but that is not always so, in which case the outputs are not directly visible and may have to be worked out by each participant. And as for organizational outcomes — they are often the least visible of all.
If this is the case, then there are two ways in which this difficulty can be addressed and changed. The first it to simply reverse the flow:
In other words, ensure the trainer begins with outcomes. Before starting to design any session or program, the trainer should clarify the outcomes required, which will then drive the learning delivered on the program. Once the outcomes are clear, the trainer can discuss and clarify what learning outputs — often in terms of knowledge and skills — the learners should acquire. Then the trainer should think about which activities would be most helpful in achieving those outputs.
An Example
Suppose the organization wanted all front-line staff to have a competent and confident first response to any customer who raised a concern or complaint. This would be the organizational outcome required.
This would lead the trainer and perhaps the client to discuss what knowledge, skills, tools and techniques the learner needed to acquire or learn to deliver a high quality response. This would clarify the outputs required.
Finally, the trainer would use their own expertise as a trainer to identify the mix of activities that would be most likely to deliver those outputs.
And an appropriate evaluation model, assessing the effectiveness of each of these three stages, would ensure all would get equal attention:
- How effective were the activities in delivering the required outputs?
- Were participants able to deliver and demonstrate those outputs?
- Did the participants use what they learned to have the impact required?
To further enhance your training sessions and maximize their impact, update and vary your delivery methods to develop innovative and engaging activities, and utilize your L&D network and available resources to assist in designing programs that address specific learning objectives and desired outcomes. Many of these resources are available online, offering trainers access to a wealth of knowledge and tools to improve their training sessions and better meet the needs of their learners.
