Planning a Training Session: Training Purpose
What training is needed for the employee? When should the training be delivered? What format? What is the reason for training? All of these questions are important in looking at making and delivering training packages. It is important that training is not delivered for the sake of training, but rather that the training serves an overall purpose in the value of the employee, the company and the training itself.
What is a Training Session?
We first need to look at exactly what a training session is. A session may be one as part of a set of packages, one which helps boost another training but can equally be done stand alone without the need of the previous training knowledge, or one which is a stand alone training. A training session can be compared to films. They may share a universal, they may be sequels or prequels, a reboot or even a stand alone. Before creating any training, we need to look at and consider the following questions:
What is the purpose of the training?
What are my objectives? (Pre, during and post training)
What is the mode and format of delivery?
What Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes (KSA) does the trainees (and trainers) need to take away from the training?
How does the flow of the training look like (activities, timing etc.)?
How will I measure success (short term and long term)?
Training Purpose
Arguably the most important question to answer in any training that is made and delivered. This question needs to be simple and easy to answer in both directions (to superiors and subordinates). The answer should be easy and simple to answer, with an answer which would provide forward benefit for the employees and the company.
If the answer is ‘We are doing the training as my manager wants this training’, then the value greatly diminishes. A clear purpose, a clear goal of the rationale for the training needs to be thought before even planning any training. If the reason is not clear from the manager or the trainer, the following problems may occur:
What are the goals for the training? Why have the training?
Audience Loss
If one of the trainee ask you ‘why do we have to attend the training’, and you have an answer such as; ‘because we just do’ or ‘because it’s mandatory training’, you will lose the audience immediately. The audience need to buy into the training from the get go. It is always recommended from the start of the training and even pre-training to give a clear rationale to all trainees on why this training is taking place.
Dullness
If you as the trainer don’t have a clear reason for the training, then consciously or subconsciously, the training won’t be as good as if you had clear reasoning for the training, as much as the amount of effort you put in. Activities won’t be as good, effort won’t be as high and therefore the training will overall be less effective. Inevitably dull training will breed content and have a snowball effect on future trainings from yourself or anyone from the company.
Irrelevance
No clear reasoning on the need of the training may potentially lead to the trainer adding materials or content which is irrelevant to the objectives and the training purpose. Every part of a training should have a clear purpose, with a smooth flow across the training. This can only be attained by clearly knowing the purpose of the training.
Measure of Success
The clearer the reasoning for the training, the easier it is to measure the success of the training, not only short term success, straight after the training, but long term success of implementation of ideas, suggestions and feedback given in the training by the trainees.
Whilst the answer may be simple, the benefits of knowing the purpose of the training will reap heavy reward. A simple framework when starting out can be:
We are running this training to introduce X to the trainees because X is a new system to the trainees
Need help in planning a training session? Click on the link below to see our training on Delivering Training Sessions - Session Design.
