WHAT MAKES A GREAT TRAINING PRESENTATION?

Has someone asked you to train a group of people?  Maybe you’re the expert on a subject that no-one else in the organization knows how to do. 

Do you feel flattered that you’ve been asked to help others learn this important skill?  Yet, you’re getting sick at your stomach because you have no clue how to create training for a team of adults?

Well, here are five hints to get you started.

Recognize that teaching adults is not the same as teaching kids.  Kids come into a learning situation as a blank slate.  They don’t know anything.  They don’t even know that they don’t know anything.  The teacher’s job, then, is to tell them what they need to know, and then ensure they learn it.

Adults, on the other hand, come in to the training with much more context.  They may already know a great deal about the subject.  Some of them may be skeptical of the new way of doing things.  In such a case your job is more complicated because you have to first deprogram them from the old habits.

Other adults may be very eager to implement the new way of doing things. 

In either case, the adults are going to have very specific questions about your subject, even before you open your mouth.  They will want answers and they may not be particularly patient while you wade through a raft of foundational material that they aren’t interested in.

How do these facts influence the design of your presentation.  To answer that question let’s see what we can learn from a very successful provider of information.  Think of the most valuable webpage in the history of the internet. What do you see? 

I’ll tell you what I see, white space.  In the middle of that white space is a little target.  When you open that webpage you are immediately focused on the target, the space where you ask your question.  Everything else that might distract the user away from the intended use of the website is scrubbed away.  The user gets what the user came for, nothing else.  All irrelevancies have been obliterated.

What happens next is magical.  Out of that severe whiteness comes a world of information, as varied as the user wants, and controlled by the user.  This is the way that adults expect to learn in the 21^st century. 

Google makes more money for its owners than they can count.  Surely there are some lessons to be learned.

How do we reconcile the spartan bareness of the Google ideal with the mass of information that we need to transfer in our training presentation?  To answer that question we need first ask why we’re having a presentation at all.  I mean, why don’t we just send an email?  It would be so much easier.

The answer, of course, is that an email is the opposite of how adults learn.  It’s a blast of words thrown at the trainee in an uncompromising way.  There is no interaction with the facilitator.  No benefit from questions that other trainees ask that you had never even thought of.

In order to provide your trainees with all the information that they want, in the order they want, and under some level of their control, you have to make some compromises.  You can’t make your presentation a total white space, but there are some things you can do.

Rule #1:  Retain as much white space as possible in your presentation.  No more than five bullet points per slide; enough to remind you of what you want to say; but sparse, to entice the trainees to ask questions.  You can fill in the rest of the information with your verbal discussion. 

Rule #2:  Give paper handouts of your slides with plenty of space for the trainees to hand write notes.  The act of writing down what is said in the verbal discussion reinforces the training.  Pick your graphics very selectively to illustrate the points you are trying to make. 

Rule #3:  Let your trainees guide the presentation.  Encourage them to ask questions.  Let the session flow freely – within the topic of the training.  If they don’t ask questions, you ask them questions. 

Rule #4:  Explore ‘dumb questions’ to their fullest.  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard dumb questions that turned out, on more intense thought, not to be so dumb after all.  But even if you’re asked a truly dumb question, treat it seriously and explore all sides of it.  You might find that there’s some aspect of it that you’ve never thought of before.  You, the trainer, might walk away wiser.

Rule #5:  Tell personal stories.  Make your training come alive to the participants by giving them a context for the principles you are teaching.