Extend the Benefits of Training

Training is guided evolution. Or at least, it should be. If you treat training workshops as stand-alone events, you’re wasting opportunity and settling for less than you should. With a little bit of forethought and strategic communication, a stand-alone training event becomes one of many leverage points on a performance continuum. Considering the time and money you spend on employee training, don’t you want to extend the benefits 30, 60, 90+ days out?

You can, and here’s how:
• Hone your planning with a pre-event survey. Ask participants to weigh in on their first (and last) choice for venue, format, training exercises, menu, etc. By inviting their opinion in advance you set a tone and build rapport before the training begins. Survey Monkey is a free tool for creating online surveys in minutes.
• Bolster participation by sharing workshop outlines in advance. Using email, batch text, or the company intranet, ask participants to "prepare to share" in order to ensure a productive session.
• Sharing a top-line overview of learning objectives and performance expectations is a great way to capture participant attention and build interest prior to the workshop.
• Tease upcoming training events in your company newsletter, with an email or text campaign, and on your website.
• Establish an event theme, and weave themed imagery into your writing to open attendees' minds and spark their creativity well before the training takes place.

After the workshop, improve retention of key learning and promote positive behavioral change with strategic follow up written communication:
• Survey participants to find out what aspect of the training was most (and least) challenging/relevant/helpful/interesting to them. Garner suggestions for future events.
• Conduct a post-training email campaign to reinforce key learning.
• Email or text success stories and best practices weekly, along with a specific strategy to execute in the week ahead.
• Use your company newsletter and web site to celebrate success stories. Write as specifically as possible about how the training workshop or strategy meeting contributed to the success.

Sally Bacchetta
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Restaurants Re-Train for Customized Service

Ask any good instructional designer or training content writer what makes a training program successful, and chances are the word "customized" will be part of their answer. Business today is much more layered than even a few years ago, with sub-markets within markets, and niches within sub-markets, each requiring customized training solutions.

Interestingly, corporations aren't the only ones with an increased appetite for training ROI. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article, titled
"How Waiters Read Your Table", which highlights restaurants that are re-training wait staff to increase sales with a more customized dining experience.

Companies are moving away from standard training scripts to methods that will have customers eating out of their hands. Through personalized or more "situational selling", the best waiters know what type of service customers prefer before they tell them.

Great instructional design can only come from a designer who understands your learners and your business. Contact me for a free consultation on serving up original, interactive, skill-based instructional design that truly delivers winning results.

Sally Bacchetta
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Finding Great Instructional Design

As I wrote in my column Why You Need Instructional Design, “Great instructional design attracts learners to the content, to the performance ideal, and to the change process. This attraction is essential for changing behavior.” If you’re looking for great instructional design, you need to find an instructional designer with these three qualifications:

Insight
You can likely get adequate ID from any qualified designer, but great instructional design can only come from a designer who understands your learners and your business. Sales representatives learn differently than managers. Physicians learn differently than writers. A great-for-you instructional designer is one who understands how to design training for learners and businesses like yours.

Every new project involves a ramp up. With an experienced designer, you can use your ramp up time to discuss deliverables, establish timelines, identify production protocols, and brainstorm concepts and themes. An inexperienced designer will need to be brought up to speed on your products or services, the state of your market, competitive analyses, training objectives, and learner profile before you can even begin to clarify the project scope. Read more

Sally Bacchetta
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Why You Need Instructional Design

Humans learn every minute of every day. We learn without overt effort or intention. We learn by existing, by seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. As long as we are conscious, we are learning. We can’t stop ourselves.

So, why does anyone need instructional design? Why not just provide content and let people learn it?

If you read any articles about the importance of instructional design (ID) you will find them peppered with the words engage and process, and yes, basic requirements of instructional design are that it engage learners and help them process specific information. But that’s not why you need ID. I have completed countless ID projects for a variety of industries, and I have found only one reason for instructional design. That is to attract a learner. The value of instructional design is in its ability to attract, because attraction has the power to change behavior.

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Sally Bacchetta
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