3 Advanced Tips to Transform Training in Your Organisation

Creating and delivering training is only part of a successful training strategy. The training you deliver also has to be effective to ensure it changes behaviours, increases skills levels, and helps you achieve your goals – both business goals and training goals.

The problem is the question of how to create successful training courses is a big one. You can use multiple training methods and techniques, and you can use a variety of different training delivery methods, from instructor-led training to blended learning to e-learning.

Whatever approach you take, there are three crucial areas you should work on to improve training in your organisation, starting with making the learning experiences you create as engaging, interesting, and relevant as possible.

Make Learning Experiences Engaging, Interesting, and Relevant

The first step to transforming training in your organisations is to critically analyse the training courses and programmes that you currently offer to learners. Some areas you should assess include:

• Is the content in the course still relevant or does it need refined, updated, or improved? Does the content still meet the objectives of the business as they exist today and is it helping achieve your training goals?
• Is the learning experience fully optimised to ensure learners engage with the course? Is the course interesting and interactive, and do learners provide positive feedback?
• Do learners value the training, and do they feel it helps them complete their day-to-day duties? Do learners believe the training is helping them progress their careers? Do they feel the training is relevant?
• Is the delivery method the best option for this type of training and topic? Would it be better to re-purpose the training using another delivery method, or is it better to simply re-create the training again from scratch? In this area, just because training has always been delivered by an instructor, for example, doesn’t mean this is the best approach. It might benefit from a switch to e-learning or blended learning.
• Are you able to properly assess the performance of the training you deliver and the impact it has on your business? This point is crucial, as without a proper analysis of the impact of training, you will find it difficult to make improvements.

Once you have gone through the above process, you are likely to have a list of improvements or changes you would like to make. The next step is to prioritise those improvements and changes so you can focus first on those that will have the fastest, biggest, and most positive impact on the business.

It is also important in this part of the process to make sure your training goals and objectives are fully aligned with the goals and objectives of the business. Without confirming this alignment, you run the risk of optimising the wrong thing.

Combat the Forgetting Curve with Reinforcement

Even the best training courses and strategies suffer from the forgetting curve. This is the natural tendency to forget what we have learned soon after we have learned it. The less we need to utilise the skill or information, the quicker we are to forget it.

As a result, you can’t fully optimise a training course if you only focus on making the course itself as good as possible. You also need to work on reinforcement strategies to help learners retain the information for the long term.

Reinforcement also helps combat slipping standards. This applies in situations where training is successful in boosting standards but, over time, those standards start dropping back again.

So, what can you do to reinforce training and combat both the forgetting curve and slipping standards? The first step is to get a full understanding of the problem. You can do this by assessing learners immediately after they have completed a course and then several weeks later – about a month is usually right. This assessment will help you understand where you need to focus your reinforcement efforts.

You then need to create refresher training courses and make them available to learners. You will also need to develop a strategy for promoting these refresher courses and encouraging learners to complete them.

Keeping the courses short and to the point can help with this promotional effort, plus you might choose to make the refresher courses compulsory. Whatever approach you choose, make sure you follow the points in the first tip in this article in relation to making training engaging.

Create Opportunities for Learners to Practice

One of the biggest causes for failure in a training course is that learners are not given the opportunity to practice. Practice is an essential part of learning, so it should be a core component of your training courses.

This is an area where e-learning often has an edge over other training delivery methods, as it is possible to create practicing opportunities that are safe and highly instructive.

Some other things to remember when creating opportunities for learners to practice:

• Include practicing opportunities throughout the course, rather than just at the end. The more learners practice, the more they will be able to retain the information.
• Use scenarios in e-learning to create real-life situations that make practicing more relevant for learners.
• Use gamification techniques to make practicing fun and engaging.

Ongoing Transformation

The three advanced tips in this article can be applied whether you are creating new training content or you want to transform existing training courses in your organisation. Training transformation is also an ongoing process. After all, you need to constantly keep up with changing market conditions in the UAE or Saudi Arabia, and you need to continuously assess whether your training strategy is delivering on the needs of the business. Ongoing training transformation will also help you stay ahead of your competition.