Is Your Corporate Training Boring?

Corporate training programs are notoriously dry. They are so focused on communicating mission-critical information that they can lose an audience very quickly. To be honest, most training courses are boring. Nobody wants to sit through another lecture or training video, no matter how important the information is. If you recognize that it’s time to step up your learning and development game, read on for some tips to help you bring your content to life.

Explore Different Formats

It’s long been known that not every student learns the same way. That’s why it’s so important to test out different formats for your training material. Provide something to read, something to listen to, something to talk about, and even something to do themselves. Everyone learns in their own way and at their own pace, but if you provide a variety of different training formats within one workshop you’ll be more likely to deliver your message successfully to a broad audience.

Stay Relevant

You may or may not be surprised at how quickly training material can become outdated, but your audience certainly will be surprised if it is no longer relevant. Respect your students’ time and keep your content fresh and current, and relevant to their experiences. Make sure what you are teaching is useful, and that it will be for the foreseeable future. Don’t waste your time or theirs for the sake of checking a box. Communicate what you’ll be focusing on at the beginning of a training session, and let your audience know how it will be useful to them in the long run.  

Break Out of the Conference Room

For those in-person training sessions that tend to bore attendees, take it outside. Go for a walk, or find a unique venue in which to provide the training. Your choice of training venue can make a workshop much more interesting and engaging. Think about providing smaller table settings to encourage conversation, or bright and interesting décor to wake up participants and keep the feelings in the room positive and upbeat. Furthermore, provide the fidgeters in the room with non-distracting toys they can play with during a lecture. This can actually increase focus and learning retention by substantial amounts.

Get A Little Playful

People connect with trainings because they can relate to them. This is why storytelling can play such a powerful role in training sessions. Stories and games that put the training into context can make a message really stick in the minds of your trainees, increasing recall and driving home the importance of the training to the company, and to them as employees as well.  Use real examples, case studies, and creative metaphors to help draw in your audience and show them the real impact of the lesson they are learning together. Similarly, music can help get everyone in the right frame of mind as well.

Are you looking to make your training more engaging?

Remember that when you are building a training session, you have control over many aspects of the learning environment. Test the waters and see what you can change to create a more engaging and interesting experience for your learners. For more tips on how to break out of your learning and development rut, connect with the experts at Clarity Consultants today.