The Art of Training

The Art of Training

Some of the tools I often used to communicate my lessons are

• PowerPoint slides - lecturing
• Whiteboard - reinforcing the ideas / concepts
• Group Exercises - social learning
• Demonstrations - visual learning
• Summary - recap on the topics
• Pre and Post Tests - feedback to the students
• Reverse shadow - enforce the student's understanding of its topic

Why would I need to use more than one tool to delivery my training? The short answer is that together the tools will help to build up the knowledge of the students on the selected topic(s) more effectively. For the long answer, please continue on (reading) ... 

Since my University days, I learned that attending a lecture is often not sufficient to fully learn a subject. Attending lectures is a rather passive form of learning. A lecture is good only as a factual type of learning a topic.   

To supplement the learning process, I often employed other techniques such as performing a demonstration to the students. Through the demonstration, the students may be able to relate the information personally. It also helps to raise the student interest and reinforce his memory retention. Learning through demonstration thus become a form of "connected learning". 

Other techniques that I have adopted to train students more effectively is through group exercises. Group exercises help some learners (e.g. social learners) to grasp a topic more easily. As students are actively engaged in pursuing the exercise, learning becomes more fun and effective. It also eliminates the "personal failure" fear factor as the participating student is no longer an individual under the lime light. In addition, it encourages the students to think less bias on the topic. 

To make learning a more "relatable experience", I often designed my materials based on a common theme. I chose the theme that most of my students can relate to personally. It could be a theme that everyone has a common interest in (e.g. Soccer or problems that they faced each day). By having a common interest, learning becomes more relatable.  

Finally, no training will go well without having an assessment test to the students. Doing an assessment gives to the students (the necessary feedback of how well the students have understood the subject and to myself, how effective I have designed and communicated my training materials. I used a very simple approach: a pretest before the training to gauge the students' pre-knowledge on the topic and a post-test to measure the students' gained in knowledge. 

A side note: have you ever wondered among yourselves about two trainers presenting the same factual content and you noted that one trainer was more effective in his training than the other? There could be many factors that lead to the different outcome, but some of the reasons could be due to

• the trainer's soft-skills

• the delivery of the trainer's content

• the way the trainer engages the audience.

• the trainer's subject matter expertise on the topic.

No textbook can teach you all of these and I am in the same boat. However, I believe that through practice, experience and dedication, I am getting there (at least from the favorable feedback from my students).  

Be prepared

I often write on the whiteboard (using "whiteboard markers") to emphasize important concepts and ideas. The last point of using whiteboard markers is a pun because I have seen so many presenters defaced the whiteboard by using permanent ink markers. That really gets my goolies as I expect that testing the marker would be the first step of any presenter before he writes on the whiteboard. The other goolies that gets me is that the previous presenter often left behind empty or near empty whiteboard markers that are unusable. Having been caught by these scenarios numerous of times, I now bring along my own whiteboard markers to any training session. 

The rest of my checklists before a training session are 

• Loan a working projector for your PowerPoint presentation from the administrator / facility
• Connectivity to internet or intranet 
• The required software or web application link for your students
• The names of your students
• The local contact person who organizes your room and lunch/drinks/tea breaks for your students
• Possible questions and problem scenarios that your students may ask
• Your technical SME