How to Avoid Delivering Boring Training Courses

Stop making your training boring. Just for a moment, think about the user experience of your training course. Forget about the quality of the content, the message, or how much more knowledgeable a learner should be once they complete the course. When you consider the user experience, how boring is it?

You could have the most informative, most insightful, and well-written content accompanied by great images but the course itself can still be uninteresting.

How then do you ensure that the training is not boring and that learners will stay engaged?

1. Keep it brief

Keep modules short so learners can complete the overall course in bite size This makes it less daunting to go through the course in the first place, plus it helps with the learning process, particularly if you use regular testing and content reinforcement techniques in each module.

2. Make it relevant

Learners are put off when they go through courses or parts of courses that are not relevant to their day-to-day reality, or that are too general in their focus. The content in your courses should, therefore, be as relevant to the learner as possible. This is much easier to achieve with e-learning than it is with other forms of learning as you can tweak particular modules to be more relevant to a particular subset of users.

3. Engage the learners in activities

As a trainer don’t focus entirely on presentation and lecturing. Include demonstration and exercises to get your trainees involved in the process. People can learn a lot on their own by trying and failing rather than by being given all the information beforehand. The retention will be much higher when they are involved and experience the tools themselves. Failure is part of learning, so give your learners a chance to fail and learn in their own time.

4. Enrich your content

Make the content media-rich with high-quality images, stunning design, video, and audio. Remember, many learners are used to this sort of experience when they access their favorite websites or apps. If your training is up to the same standard, learners will be more likely to engage.

5. Use storytelling

Storytelling is a fundamentally human capacity, widely embraced as the most powerful teaching tool. 5 people out of 100 remember statistics; 63 in 100 remember stories. In the age of digital media, competing for employee attention is difficult. With characters, plot, dialogue and other conventions, our courses use story to grab attention from the beginning and create an emotional response throughout the course. Stories provide context, context helps with retention, and learning retention is critical.

6. Design different learning styles

We all have a way in which we best learn.  Odds are, every student in your class has a different preferred learning style, which can make it difficult for you to be the most effective teacher.  However, by trying to incorporate various methods into your training, you may be able to reach the majority of your students. 

For example; someone with a Visual learning style has a preference for seen or observed things, including pictures, diagrams, demonstrations, displays, handouts, films, flip-chart, etc.

Finally….

Find what works for you and your learners. Do your research and always stay prepared. Looking to grow and develop your skills as a trainer? Sign up for this Training of Trainers Course today!