The importance of Professional Training

How not to conduct a training

John needs to give sales training to a new batch of internal sales people. He is in fact the sales manager who brings in a lot of money, but he is not a trainer. His idea of delivering a training is to create a PowerPoint presentation with all the information the new hires need.

The day of the training, John arrives at the training room and greets his eager new staff. They are keen to learn and John is staring into their excited faces. He fires up his laptop and starts the PowerPoint presentation which was created for him by his assistant. He has no idea of what is in it but since he’s an experienced sales manager, he is sure he will be able to “wing it”.

The first three slides are not really a problem, introduction and agenda… what can go wrong with that? But then he clicks his pointer and the first training slide appears. It’s full of text, bullet points and headers.  Since he hasn’t seen the presentation up front, he decides to read out loud what is on the slides since they cover everything. He turns his back to the class and clicks one slide after the other.

After ten minutes his audience is no longer eager and excited. They still listen to John read from the slides but nothing sticks. Five more minutes and they become bored. By the end of the session, none of the trainees know what they need to do to start their new job. And yet, John has explained everything to them in great detail.

What went wrong?

The problems which occurred during Johns training have nothing to do with John’s capabilities as a sales manager. But he is not a trainer, he didn’t know how to capture the audience’s attention and how to teach them something. And that was due to several factors:

• For one, he didn’t prepare for the session. If he had seen the presentation upfront, he might have made changes so that there was less text on the slides and more visual aids. He might have known what came next and would not have been limited by the text on the screen. 
• Another factor was that John didn’t involve the class in the training, he just explained things. He had no idea if his message came across, if the trainees understood the material and he never asked if there were any questions. 
• The third thing that could have gone better was his behavior in front of the room. He was stationary the whole time where studies have shown that moving about, pointing to things and even walking among the students has a positive impact on the ability to learn.

 Being a trainer is a skill in it’s own right. As a trainer there are some things you need to take into account:

• The content needs to be clear and appealing. Examples work very well
• Engaging with the class helps to keep trainees focused. This can be in the form of questions and answers, small discussions and interactive exercises
• Always ask for feedback, this helps you as a trainer to avoid certain pitfalls

There were more things that could have been done better, but we will go into these in our next blog post. We will then show how successful training is done and help you avoid often made mistakes..

In the meantime, check out our other blog posts on learning and training. Or you can contact us for more information on how our certified trainers can help you get the most out of your training.