How to Make Your Training User-Friendly Part I

Most successful organisations spend a good percentage of their staff development budget on training. But why do some workers still commonly see training as an ineffective distraction from the main business of the company and a waste of time and precious company funds?

Some say, ‘‘the training simply does not help you to do the job better!’’ That is another way of saying the training does not transfer into practice. If you are a trainer, a training manager or you are in any way involved in making decisions on training, you would want to know why your staff are not excited about training. The bottom line is that if staff see training as a waste of time, chances are that there is a mismatch between them and the training provided. This is where user friendly training comes in.

In the next few ezines, let me share a few tips that I have learnt over the years about getting a good match between the training event and the delegate.

1. Training Must Be Relevant & Seen As Relevant

For your staff to see the training as important, the training must be relevant to the job, company bottom line, and your customers. It is amazing how many training events have no bearing on any of these important factors. Your training will struggle on popularity rating, if workers can not see the connection between the event and the normal work day. You try teaching a room full of carpenters how to lift photocopy boxes. You are not going to be very successful because these men are used to lifting heavy doors, and wooden boards, sometimes up the stairs! The training in lifting boxes is not relevant. It will not go far.

Sometimes it is not the relevance of training to the task that is the problem, but the relevance to the customer.