By Melanie Windle, Personal Development Consultant at MLP Training
As the economic recovery continues, ensuring you have the trained staff you need to drive growth has never been more important, and one method that many organisations use to maximise the value of the talent within their business is internal training.
Sharing valuable expertise is not as simple as putting the person with the knowledge in front of those who need to learn - training can only be effective if it addresses different learning styles of the people.
Internal training programmes can face difficulties if businesses don’t understand the way in which variations in learning styles need to be addressed, and it’s unlikely you will achieve the training outcomes you were hoping for.
These challenges that companies face in delivering effective training led MLP to develop its two-day ‘Training the Trainer’ course, which is suitable for anyone with a training remit, from those developing and delivering training materials for the first time to experienced training professionals.
Delegates that have taken this course in the past have varied considerably and face a range of challenges depending on their level of experience, their remit and their audiences.
The course takes delegates on a journey through the various elements of becoming an effective trainer, including designing training programmes, activities and materials, using ‘off the shelf’ materials, presentation styles and techniques for taking and utilising feedback. It also looks at various training approaches, including solo vs co-training and the use of groups in a training setting.
MLP’s ultimate aim is to provide delegates with a practical toolkit that will enable them to design, construct and deliver effective training sessions, building on their knowledge, skills and confidence so that they understand the learning styles they will encounter and have the strategies they need to deal with challenging behaviour.
The most common trap that inexperienced trainers fall into is to design courses based on the ways in which they themselves learn. MLP’s ‘Training the Trainer’ course outlines 10 influences on learning styles and explains how addressing all ten of these during every training session will ensure that all delegates are engaged during the session, enabling the trainer to achieve the required outcomes from the session.
These learning styles include ‘Activist’, ‘Reflector’, ‘Theorist’, ‘Pragmatist’, ‘Visual’, ‘Auditory’, ‘Reading and Writing’, ‘Kinesthetic’, ‘Left brain ‘ and ‘Right brain’.
Delegates also learn how to deal with difficult situations during training sessions, such as aggressive and confrontational characters and people who don’t want to learn or resent the time investment required to attend training sessions.
Giving trainers practical strategies that they can adopt in challenging situations really helps them feel prepared, and we build role playing into the course so that delegates don’t just understand the theory but have experienced how the techniques we give them work in practice.
In any training scenario, making the session relevant, accessible and memorable is essential. Only when the trainer can achieve all that will the training be truly memorable and the outcomes deliver genuine value from your training budget.
For more information about the next 'Training the Trainer' course (28 - 29 September 2015) click here
As author, publisher, trainer and motivational speaker, I have trained over 10,000 people and inspired professionals across the UK, USA and the Far East. Working as a Training Consultant to many of…
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