Trainees

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Training For Non-Trainers: How To Train People In 5 Steps



I spent 15 years teaching English as a foreign language. I leveraged my teaching skills to get my first job in the contact center industry as a training and quality manager.

Our leaders were very talented but had no idea how to train people.

Subject matter experts in IT companies had the same problem. They were the experts but had no idea how to teach.

Leaders train and develop their teams. The team delivers better results. Parents teach and bring up their children. Hopefully, they lead more fulfilling lives.

Teaching is a key leadership skill. It can be taught.

Teaching ranges from a five-minute session on how to do something to delivering a doctoral-level course.

The shortest lesson and the longest course have certain things in common.

Aims


Woman talks to a coworker in the office

Any unit of instruction needs a clear and precise aim.

Aims are best defined using “can-do” statements. They say: “By the end of this lesson/course, a participant can...”

You will have to ask yourself “What does 'can do X' mean?”

Your aim may be more complex than you thought. Instead of one lesson, you may need a course with multiple lessons and multiple aims.

Assumed/Required Knowledge


Woman attends a virtual work training

There’s nothing worse than teaching people what they know already. However, your training session will collapse if your trainees do not know the minimum required to understand your content.

Define what they need to know before they start. Ask yourself if your trainees have this knowledge.

Look at your aims and ask yourself what they need to know. If you are teaching someone to create and use formulae in spreadsheets, your trainees will need to know basic arithmetic.

If you are training people to play their part in a process, they will need to know something about the whole process. They will understand the importance of what they are doing and why they have to do it in a certain way. Without this, they have no reason to try and do it properly.

Structure


Man runs a training session at work

​A good training session needs “inputs” and “outputs.” A typical “death by PowerPoint” session is all inputs and no outputs. At most, trainees will remember five percent of it.

As a bare minimum, a training session should include the following:

  • A "Lead In”: The simplest is to tell participants what the session is about. You can also ask them what they already know about the topic, and what they want to learn. This way, you find out their expectations.
  • Input: An input session should be no longer than 20 minutes. That is the average human concentration span. For teenagers, even that can be a stretch. Active learning is better than passive learning. Consider using exercises where participants match rules to examples. When going through the answers, you explain the key concepts.
  • Output: This is the part most “trainers” forget! “Output" is an exercise or a test to see how much trainees have understood. Output activities may involve simulation exercises, role plays, or practical exercises. Trainees get the chance to “play” with their newfound knowledge in a realistic scenario. “Playing” is often very important to help trainees understand how to use what they have learned.

Delivery/Interaction With Trainees


Coworkers talk during a work training session

Successful training is never one way. You adapt to the trainees. You need to watch how your trainees react to the content.

My philosophy is if my trainees don’t understand anything, it’s not their fault; it’s my fault. If they don’t understand, I haven’t done my job properly. This is an important mindset.

Frequent changes of activity are recommended to keep your trainees’ attention. Pair and group activities are also recommended. Trainees engage more actively with the content if they are working with another person than they do in a question-and-answer session with the trainer.

Trainees need frequent opportunities to ask questions. Trainees may not want to ask questions in front of the class, so you can stimulate questions by asking a few of your own. This is where concept-checking questions come in handy. They can often be “What happens if…?” or “Why do we …?" questions.

Evaluating Learning


Employees play a game at work after a training session

Without evaluation, we do not know how successful our training is.

Many training courses limit their evaluation to a feedback form where trainees express their satisfaction. That does not tell us how well they understand and can use their newfound knowledge.

Where a training session contains an output activity, the simplest form of assessment is to see how well they complete the activity.

Other evaluations can include tests and quizzes. These can be gamified to make them entertaining rather than intimidating.

Looking beyond the end of the course, you can also ask trainees’ managers how much trainees have improved their performance based on the training they have received.

Next Steps


Man on laptop plans his next training session

When you deliver your next training session or “knowledge transfer,” think about:

  • What must your trainees be able to do?
  • What do they need to know before they start? How do you know they have this knowledge?
  • How are you going to deliver your content?
  • How will you check your trainees’ understanding?

Once you’ve thought about these questions and delivered your training, get in touch with me and tell me how it went!

Further reading...

For more knowledge transfer techniques read:

Test-Teach-Test: A Quick And Effective Way To Plan Training

How To Conduct IT Training The Army Way

Acquiring Job Advance Your Career Career Changing Careers and Employment Education Internship

Training For Non-Trainers: How To Train People …

Understanding — The Trainer’s “Holy Grail”



How do you know if you understand something?

I am a non-technical person working in an IT company. My colleagues will often tell me something technical. Sometimes I understand what they are saying. Sometimes I have no idea what they are talking about. Sometimes I think I understand what they are telling me when they are telling me, but then later I realize that I don’t understand it at all.

Understanding is complex. As communicators and trainers, we need to think about how understanding works to communicate and train effectively.

We are all communicators and trainers at one time or another.

What Is Understanding?


Employees take notes during a work training

A quick Google search of “understanding” does not provide a clear answer.

Researchgate, quoting “Newton, 2000,” says, “Understanding implies being able to think, act and apply the knowledge in different ways in various situations.”

Robert Ryshke, writing in “gse.harvard.edu,” states, “Understanding a topic of study is a matter of being able to perform in a variety of thought-demanding ways with the topic.”

Artseducator.org says something very similar: “Understanding is a matter of being able to do a variety of thought-provoking things with a topic.”

Let’s Ask Again: How Do You Know If You Understand Something?


Decoding/understanding concept

If someone explains something to you and then asks you if you understand it, you will probably reply based on how you feel.

As a trainer, you may well look at your trainees’ faces to see if they understand the material. When they don’t understand, they may look uncertain or give you the “What are you talking about?” look. (My two-year-old niece is very good at that!)

The feeling that you understand is sometimes deceptive. This is why educators use “output activities” or tests to see if trainees really understand.

How Can We Test Understanding?


understand your customer concept

The worst thing you can do is ask: “Do you understand?” It puts the burden of understanding on the trainee. If he doesn’t understand, it’s the trainer’s fault. She needs to explain the content in a different way.

When learning in groups, trainees may not say they do not understand for fear of looking stupid in front of their colleagues.

There are a number of options you can build into your training plan. These options are based on Wiggins and McTighe’s “6 Facets of Understanding”:

  1. Ability to explain the content: This has to be more than just repeating the material verbatim. Let’s imagine you are teaching sales agents a new sales script. If your trainees create a mind map to explain the material they received in a PowerPoint presentation, they are reformatting the information and engaging with it at a deeper level than they would by repeating it.
  2. Interpreting the content: To see how well your agents might understand the sales script, ask them to explain it to their colleagues as if the other person was five years old, their grandmother, or to an alien from another planet. Their challenge is to explain it to someone who does not have the same contextual knowledge that they do.
  3. Applying the content: When teaching your sales team the new script, this will include getting them to role play it. One trainee will be the salesperson and the other the customer. Role plays can include “what would you do if…?” scenarios to practice dealing with different types of customers and handling different objections.
  4. Having a perspective based on the content: You can build this into the role plays by asking the “customer” to play a specific kind of customer and behave as this kind of person might behave. In a business-to-consumer scenario, this might involve playing roles representing different demographics. In a business-to-business context, this might mean playing the roles of customers in different verticals who have different requirements and different ways of behaving. Builders have different needs and behave in different ways from bankers.
  5. Empathize: When adopting roles in the role-play training, ask trainees to imagine how customers might feel and put those emotions into the training. This could include angry and aggressive customers. This gives trainees playing the salesperson’s role the chance to test their skills in handling an angry customer, while it gives the trainee playing the “angry customer” the chance to imagine how the angry customer is feeling, and adjust how she handles him accordingly.
  6. Have self-knowledge: Some trainees may find this uncomfortable since trainees need to examine their own reactions and feelings towards the content. For salespeople, particularly after they have role-played a demanding conversation, this may help them to understand and manage their own emotional responses when facing, for example, angry customers.

The Ball’s In Your Court!


Woman trains her colleagues at work

Are you planning some training? How do you know that you understand the content well enough to train it? What questions are you afraid people will ask? How do you plan to test your trainees’ understanding?

I’d love to hear more about it! Drop me a line!

Further reading...

The following article may be both relevant and useful: Explaining How Things Work: How To Do It And Why It Matters

Acquiring Job Advance Your Career Career Changing Careers and Employment Education Internship

Understanding — The Trainer’s “Holy Grail”