In tough economic times, every corporation needs to guard against waste and inefficiency. That’s where corporate training can prove crucial. But are employees receiving the correct training and in the most efficient format?

1. Classroom Doldrums
Many employees like outings. They are a chance to get away from the pressure and tedium of their jobs. An outing (even if it’s only down the hall to the corporate training center) can prove a refreshing distraction—almost a “paid vacation.” But the class itself frequently doesn’t live up to its promise.

Sometimes even the mid-level execs who exit these training sessions can be heard mumbling their disagreements—lack of consensus. But all too frequently, the bulk of employees can be seen marking time, doing texting on their cell phones, doodling and the like. They’re bored, but at least they’re getting paid for it.

2. Trainer Blindness
Many corporate trainers are nominally good at what they do, like many teachers in public school. They may know training, but they may not always know the material. Sometimes the trainer is only freshly trained in the material themselves; they are not seasoned veterans. In other words, they can’t answer the tough questions. That’s embarrassing.

Also, without the proper background experience with the material, the trainer can miss opportunities to illuminate the material in a way that can prevent future problems—like an awareness of computer security weaknesses. There may be “conventional wisdom” that everyone may have heard about, but then the frontline experts may see it differently because of empirical experience. Having the wrong trainer can worsen this kind of disconnect.

3.

Read More

There will always come a time when you start to think that there is nothing in the world that can help you deal with your stress. The bills just keep pouring in, the number of hours in a day never seems to be enough to fit all your work, and the demands of family and career just keep getting bigger and bigger. The truth is, you could control all these if you wanted to. The mere realization that you are in control is a big step and the foundation of managing stress.

Managing your stress levels is all about taking control and adapting, be it with your thoughts, schedule, emotions, work, relaxation, and your environment. Your main goal should be a balance between the times you spend at work, fun and your relationships as well as your fortitude to face any challenges head on and keep a level head when under pressure.

Here are 4 key ways to get there.

1.  Identification

Stress management training starts when you identify the sources of your stress. This may sound easy but sometimes the exact sources are not always obvious; you might be doing something now and be completely oblivious to the fact that it may be the source of your stress. It is very easy to overlook stress induced by your feelings, behaviors and your thoughts. Sure, you may think that it’s your constant worrying about the deadlines for your work but maybe the source of the stress is because of your procrastination instead of the actual demand for your job that leads to this “deadline stress.”

2.  Watch and Observe

In order to pinpoint the exact source of stress, you will need to observe your attitude, excuses and your habits. Until you find it in yourself to accept the responsibility of playing a part in maintaining or creating stress, your stress levels will never be within your control.

3.  Keep a journal

A great way to manage stress is to make an actual stress journal.

Read More

In the office world, miscommunication and conflict are two things that happen frequently. These are two things that are inevitable, seeing as how multiple individuals with different backgrounds, views and personalities are required to come together to work as a single cohesive unit. The small differences in personality and manners are magnified when work styles, work constraints and stress are added into the mistakes. Add in age and cultural differences and you have a breeding ground for misunderstandings in the workplace.

This is precisely why time and resources must be spent for the training and development of employees and managers. Communication training is something that every business owner and professional must seriously look into in order to reap the benefits of a more productive workplace. Conflict is indeed inevitable, but that doesn’t mean you should let it ruin your work environment and cause unneeded stress.

Here are 4 tips to resolve conflict in your work office. If you’re thinking about all undergoing proper communication training, these are great ideas for your workforce to acquaint themselves with.

1.  Complain the Right Way

As tempting as it is to do so, moaning and whining is never a good way to formulate a complaint in the office. Instead of pouting and saying that, you were somehow never allowed to speak at meetings, why not say instead that you believe you were in a position to contribute some good ideas at meetings? Always provide valid reasons behind your complaints and formulate them in a professional manner.

2.  Listen to Others’ Points of View

Misunderstandings are the single biggest culprits when it comes to conflicts in the office, so it only makes sense for us to tell you to listen carefully to what others have to say.

Read More

Teams. When we think about them, we often picture sports teams, groups of men and women working together as one unit to accomplish a single goal: win.

In the office setting, the same concept still applies. Whatever business you’re in or whatever employment position you hold, it’s almost always a guarantee that you are working as part of a team.  Undergoing teamwork training is always a good place to start, but it’s not enough to actually encourage a teamwork mentality. This starts in the mindset of each and every member of the team—yes, that includes you, too.

That said, here are some ways to get the aforementioned team mentality to make your training and development faster.

1.  Develop Initiative

When you see something wrong in the workplace, do you wait for someone else to fix it, or do you go check how you can try to improve it? Likewise, when your actions are being criticized by your superiors, do you sulk or find ways to make up for your mistakes and become better? Always be aware of yourself and your surroundings, and take the initiative in areas that need improvement.

2. Team First, Before Yourself

We’re not saying that you shouldn’t look after yourself; what we mean to say is that selfishness, egotism, and self-serving attitudes have no place in a team. These attitudes have the potential of ruining the entire structure of an organization.

As part of a team, you need to approach organizational questions with questions of your own. Can it benefit the whole team? Would the profit, if any, be funneled to you personally or the whole team? We all have our interests, but if it goes against what’s best for the team…

3.  Know Something Others Don’t? Share It!

Read More

Stress training is something that’s easier said than done. Learning how to manage your stress is a process that’s long and gradual—you don’t have to expect yourself to be good at it from the get go. What you can do however is start conditioning your mind and body in order to be better prepared for stress management training.

Here are 5 tips to do just that.

1.  Get your Fair Share of Exercise

Regular exercise is the one of the best ways to fight stress. Stress has an interesting way of tiring you out. During the day, your body and mind feels tired due to the stressful situations you have to deal with. Come bedtime however, this feeling of tiredness doesn’t translate to immediate sleep—quite the contrary in fact, as stress can also cause insomnia. Exercise allows you to sleep better, and gets your mind off of the daily grind.

2.  Meditate and Go Find your Sensual Experience

Everyone needs to get away from stressful situations. If you feel a panic attack or feel that fatigue is setting in, get away from it all by isolating yourself from the rest of the world. Whether it’s by hitting the spa, going to a quiet room, or simply playing soothing music on your iPod, find a way to meditate. You can supplement the experience by adding sensual factors, such as candles, lighting and more.

3.  Immerse yourself in a Hobby

Hobbies can either be an active activity, such as cycling or sports, or a reflective one, such as writing, reading and poetry. Sometimes, they can even be a mix of both, as is the case with gardening and fish keeping. In any case, just find a hobby you can immerse yourself in and forget about your troubles and worries. Everyone needs a way to get away from it all and get a better perspective of their life.

4.  Have a Laugh

Read More

When’s the last time you felt stressed out? No matter how hard we try, detecting stress is something that doesn’t happen in a snap. The same goes for halting it the moment you detect it. Stress training and development however, can make things a little easier, as it puts your relationship with stress on a whole new perspective. In fact, it’s a travesty that not everyone avails of stress training, as it yields tremendous results that alleviate many stress-related problems. With stress training, you can even go as far as to reverse your stress and not waste an entire day that would’ve otherwise been ruined by stress.

Here are some simple yet effective stress training tips many of the experts in this field recommend.

Hit the Road and Walk
It may not sound like a miracle solution or anything, but taking a walk is one of the most effective steps against a stress ‘attack’. Getting yourself out of a stressful situation and walking allows you to calm your mind, collect your thoughts and lower your stress levels. It also gets your heart beating regularly, something which doesn’t happen when you’re under a lot of stress.

Play Some Meditation Music
You know how the spa or massage joint you visit likes to play meditation music and nature sounds? It’s because they’re relaxing! Meditation music soothes your mind and allows you to remove your mental awareness away from your stressful environment. Simply put on your headphones, power up your iPod and turn to your meditation playlist.

Breathe In, Breathe Out
The simple practice of breathing in and out in a special way can be enough to bring down your stress levels. It’s a little known fact that stress results in people holding their breath—it’s a natural reaction our body makes. Forcing yourself to calm down and breathe helps your body and mind relax.

Read More

The phrase, ‘No man is an island,’ could not be any truer than it is today. In a world where globalization is occurring at an unprecedented pace, the need to communicate with those around you effectively has become a crucial factor that makes or breaks your chances of achieving success, whether it be for school, work or the entrepreneurial world.

The need for good speaking and writing skills has never been more pronounced, with hundreds seeking effective communication training to gain an edge over the competition. This comes as no surprise, as having solid communication skills has shown to give people the ability to get a head start over people who are not as assertive. For example, even if you do have the skills and talents to be successful in a certain function or task, they wouldn’t do you any good if you couldn’t talk about them to your peers and superiors effectively.

If you’re thinking of facilitating your own corporate training and development to gain better communication skills, here are 4 steps to try out.

Work on your Body Language
More than half of what humans say doesn’t come out of their mouths, but through their actions and body language. When speaking to someone, make sure you look relaxed. Don’t slouch, instead, maintain a straight and confident posture—but don’t look arrogant. Regardless of whether you are the one doing the talking or listening, your body language needs to convey the message that you’re attentive and confident. Be sure to make eye contact with whom you’re speaking, nod occasionally to show you’re paying attention, and never ever cross your arms as it shows you’re uninterested and bored.

Maintain Clarity when Speaking
The best way to know if your speech is clear and concise is to have someone pay attention to your speech mannerisms.

Read More

If something is clear nowadays, is that a company’s long-term success is directly linked to the efficiency and capacity of its personnel, and how efficient people are depends on the personal growth opportunities and career supervision they get.

Companies are always looking for the best way to control their future without spending in an unsustainable way; however, they are in constant danger of losing key personnel, the one with the talent and unique skills, which could mean the difference between succeeding or going under in such times of hard competition.

When it focuses on the training and development of its staff, a company will begin to understand the advantages and future profit that can come from e-learning and learning management systems (LMS).

LMSs take care of the management of employee training, certification, expert training, and career path supervision, and they can do this as a portable self-study system, as an online or onsite approach, or in the way of virtual corporate training sessions imparted by knowledgeable instructors.

Through an LMS, you can train large groups of employees in very little time no matter where they are located, you have the capacity to generate several comprehensive reports for completed courses and test results, and your people can learn at the speed they feel is right for them.

Obviously, e-learning poses an important economic advantage for several reasons:

• The more people you can train, the lower the cost per person.
• There is no need for hiring instructors and paying for their stay.
• More is learned in a more efficient way; so, there is less waste of resources.

There are 4 things you have to think about before choosing an LMS:

1.  The skills your personnel needs to cultivate
Can these be taught through e-learning or would another method work better?

Read More

There is no question about it! Training and development are key when talking about making your team more efficient. They are the best way to guarantee everyone has the skills needed to work in a productive, safe, and effective way. Nevertheless, even though training makes your staff more efficient … do you have a 100% efficient training method? Have you confirmed it gives you the return on investment you expect? Are you able to control every aspect of the process? Can you confirm everyone is learning what and how they are supposed to be learning?

Well… let us tell you…

Your company is very lucky to be operating in the era of technological improvement, because now you can polish up your training approaches to take advantage of custom learning, improved engagement, and far-reaching performance analysis.

Today, Learning Management Systems (LMS) use the Internet to supply employees, who need to learn or perfect a skill, with online training courses directly on their desks. In this way, you achieve two things:

• You make sure any employee in need of developing a skill has access to top-quality training, and
• You can train big groups of employees in a fast, dependable, and coherent way.

These let your company assess, register, deliver, and track skills in a very efficient way. You can send a course to employees across the organization, manage, and track their progress, and you don’t have to install any hardware of software, making it a highly cost-effective solution.

Many LMS’s give employees access to large libraries of corporate training courses that can improve and benefit their jobs; they don’t have to travel or leave the office to attend class, which simplifies the learning process for everyone, employees and managers, and they can sign in and take the courses at their own pace and when they have the time to focus.

Read More

There is usually a time in any business where you think it might be useful to ask your customers what they think and get their opinions.  This is particularly useful if you’re considering launching a new product or service and want to know whether people are likely to buy it. So if you do want to find out what your customers are thinking, what’s the most effective way to do this and what sort of questions should you be asking? 

Before I cover that, let’s start by looking at an ineffective survey. I filled in a survey a couple of days ago and the person was asking about work life balance. The question went something along the lines of “Which work life balance issues are you currently struggling with?” Following the question, there were a number of options none of which applied to me. I wanted to write “I don’t really feel I have any work life balance issues,” but no option was available for me to do this. 

My first tip on writing an effective survey is always to remember that while you want people who are experiencing whatever you’re asking them about to answer your survey, people who don’t fall into that category are likely to answer your survey too so don’t forget about them. 

Whenever you’re putting a survey together, I always take a blank sheet of paper, write my topic in the middle and then have a good think about what it would be useful to know. Write down as many questions as you can think of – you can always get rid of the questions later. Creating your questions in this way will help keep you focused on the main question you’re trying to answer. Keep coming back to this main topic – are the questions you’re going to ask potential customers going to help you answer this main question? If yes, keep going. If no, revise your questions. When you’ve finished this exercise, you’re going to have a basic questionnaire in place. Now you need somewhere to create your survey.

Read More

“Mathematics… mathematics is never going to lead you to higher truth. Because it’s boring!” – Charles, “A Beautiful Mind,” Universal Pictures (2001)

Multitasking…true, human multitasking is a fallacy. This came to mind when we visited our son in his room recently. His computer had four windows open plus IM going, his iPod was plugged into his ears (thankfully he wasn’t sharing the noise), his TV was on in the corner, he was texting with his phone. He said he was getting a lot done by multitasking. We call it switching tasks…very fast but switching none the less. Sure, your quad core computer or dual core smartphone can multiprocess; but it’s not multitasking it’s simply executing a bunch of things simultaneously…it’s not thinking. When he’s working on a report, that’s where the mind is. When he’s IMing, texting; that’s what he’s thinking about. When he’s surfing…he’s surfing. When he’s updating one of his social pages…he’s there. Everything else is white noise. Nash explained it a little differently when he said, “I’ve gotten used to ignoring them and I think, as a result, they’ve kind of given up on me. I think that’s what it’s like with all our dreams and our nightmares.” You may even be one who firmly believes you have really mastered multitasking.

A Lot About Nothing – When people are online today, they increasingly carry out other activities because they’re sure they can. Some of the activities are effective white noise. Others are lost the minute they turn away, in a few hours, a few days. But with data/content coming at us from everywhere, it is as natural as eating at your computer. Source – GfK Roper

Congratulations!! But go into a meeting with another multitasking master.

Read More

Life can become hectic with schedules changing and tasks to carry out. I know a lot of you can relate out there, especially when it comes to juggling our day to day activities, whether at work or errands for your family and home. This is where time management comes in and having the insight to manage what you do, as well as when to do it, will certainly make life easier.

A lot of times people tend to think that if they do the small tasks first, they are starting off on the right foot. But there are time management experts who say that you should do the opposite. Imagine waking up in the morning and doing the lightest or smallest possible task; what if you have 10 of these ‘little’ tasks to do? You would end up spending the entire day catering to things that aren’t so important. So instead of dealing with time this way, do the opposite by taking care of the heaviest possible task at hand. This is also known as “Swallowing the biggest frog first”.

It may be dreadful, having to face such a big challenge and responsibility at the start of your day, but it will surely pay off. Like they say-going through the hardest, will make everything else seem easy. With this said, I would like to share with you something that I think is very powerful, which is called the Pareto Rule. It has the 80/20 principle, wherein only 20 percent of what you do on a day-to-day basis, actually matters. It is something that should be aware of because it s a general rule of nature that we have cannot find a reason for. It was simply observed in so many systems worldwide, from establishing that 20% of the pods have 80% of the bins to the observation that 20% of the bugs produce 80% from all the software crushes.

Read More

It isn’t always easy to organize your day in an effective manner. The busier your schedule gets, the more you will start to panic and feel overwhelmed. This is a big problem for many, especially those who have to balance a career, a family and a social life. But learning to cope with it and eliminate most obstacles is as easy as discovering how to better manage your time.

Time management is an important skill that we are sadly often lacking in. It isn’t a natural process that we learn in school, and if our parents weren’t that good at it than it can be assumed that we never learned it at home, either. But it is never too late to discover the in’s and out’s of organizing your day, week and month.

Here are five easy ways that you can better manage your time and improve your life in the process.

• Learn to prioritize your tasks. It may seem overly simplistic, but just knowing what you can put off and what needs to be completed immediately is a big step towards your ultimate time management goal. After all, if you panic about a task that isn’t due to be done for a week, you are wasting time that can be applied to what needs to be done by the end of the day. Not to mention, putting a lot of unneeded stress on yourself.
• Use a day planner or list. Whether you get a PDA or you scribble it down on a piece of paper, having your day planned out and tasks listed is a great way to get them done quickly and without hassle. It will also keep you from forgetting anything, and so wasting more time having to make it up, or adding to your responsibilities the next day. Plus, seeing it all categorized can be soothing, as you see it is doable.
• Combine tasks. You don’t have to do one thing at a time. You can bunch tasks together to save minutes or even hours of your day.

Read More

Employment law, let’s face it, is a minefield – an ever-changing tangle of legislation covering all aspects of human resources; it’s hard to keep up if you don’t have an in-house HR team. This is particularly true of the recruitment process. You need to be mindful of where you advertise any job vacancies, be careful about reason for rejecting candidates, ensure your interview questions are consistent and relevant; and treat all applicants the same, fair way – appointing only on the basis of skill, not because of their relationship with the boss.

Is it any wonder that so many businesses these days have decided to leave their recruitment to the professionals, freeing up their own staff to do other, more productive things? Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is fast gaining popularity. Consider this: the maximum payment at an employment tribunal is now £236,000 and it’s possible for rejected applicants to claim for discrimination on the grounds of gender, age, race, marital status and sexual orientation. Even when you thought you’d been so careful.

RPO can take all of this worry out of your hands by managing the entire recruitment process for you. It can assist in putting together job descriptions and advertisements, then recommend the best channels through which to publicise your vacancy. RPO also takes care of the screening process for you, rejecting candidates based on legally-acceptable specifics defined between you, i.e. a minimum grade C in Maths. If assessment is necessary, the RPO Company will administer tests and revert back with the results. They will always be on hand for guidance and, depending on the level of responsibility you wish to relinquish you will be consulted as and when necessary.

RPO representatives can hold interviews for you or wish you, should you wish and relay decisions to all candidates.

Read More

Over the years, I’ve worked with many small business owners who are often put off from doing a task because they feel they need to have everything in place before they can move forward. 

Take one client who wanted to run some workshops for her business. Sounded like a great plan, but she didn’t want to do any marketing for them until she had completely planned out the workshop and knew exactly what the presentation would look like. 

Another contact didn’t want to do any marketing for their business until their website was in place – even though it could potentially take months to do. 

If you find yourself stuck on a project because certain things are not in place, there is one piece of advice I’m going to offer you… 

Think Backwards 

You see, while our client could have spent a great deal of time on getting the presentation looking perfect or our contact could have taken months on his website, none of this is going to help you get any business through the door. 

Instead, my plan taking the workshops as an example, would be to concentrate my time, energy and focus on filling the seats for the workshop. Why? Well, you could have the best presentation ever but if you have no-one to deliver it to, then there is very little point spending a lot of time on it.

Believe me, if you know you’ve got a room full of people to deliver that training too, there is no greater incentive to get your presentation up to scratch before the event. 

With the website example, yes I can see that the website is important, but it’s more important to start getting your marketing messages out there as quickly as possible. A website can always be put in place later or worked on slowly over time and is not an excuse for not getting on with things. 

Read More

Time Management is Bogus! We really don’t understand the problem. In fact, time is unmanageable – it just keeps tickin’ along. And there’s nothing we can do about it. Time should be manageable, but it’s not! Thousands and thousands of pages have been written about “time management.” The trick, of course, is not reading but doing. This little piece may include all the direction necessary.

The problem: We can’t manage time. Smashing the timepiece won’t help. We can manage ourselves, providing we agree that “we have met the enemy, and they is us!” Have a look at this “enemy.” You will manage him, or you will not. You can.

Also:
1. You never have enough time. Or,
2. You have all the time there is.
If you recognize that you actually have this second item as a personal choice, you can move forward.

When we look at how we manage our own time, most of us see a mess.
a. Endless do-lists
b. Broken agreements with others
c. Broken agreements with ourselves.
d. Frustration, anger and a sense of helplessness.

Anonymous: “Time is the currency of our lives. How we spend it tells much about us!” One answer – action.

This quote from Conrad Hilton: “Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”

So, what can we do to stop thinking and get into action?
1. Bag the endless do-lists. The alternative- some guidelines I’ve cribbed from Peter Allen and his book on Getting Things Done. Remembering what you need to do is critical- obsessing about it is deadly. Yes, I coach on the topic.

2. Identify one thing which is important but not urgent in your world – around your business, your relationships, whatever. Make a space for this opportunity, in time, in your day, on your calendar. One hour a day, 5 days a week.

Read More

Focus – Harder and harder to do! If you’re an entrepreneur or a startup possibility, you probably have things you haven’t gotten around to. Usually, they’re Important but Not Urgent. Issues which could be highly valuable to the development of your business and your bottom line, but are set aside because of all the damn things you have to do every day.  How do you handle the CEO things? How avoid being the “chief employee?” How do you manage the distractions of the Urgent? I’d be happy to have a conversation with you. I’m writing a book on the subject. I’ve spent a lot of time as an entrepreneur and coach, working with entrepreneurs, dealing with this absolutely critical issue. You want the people who report to you to “do the thing right.” But your job is “to do the right thing.” And to know the difference! If you make space in your life to decide what the “Right Thing” really is, and then do it, you will inevitably do well. Making the space is the trick, the hard thing, the good thing. This is your focus, as an entrepreneur. It’s also the focus of my coaching.

No rush – just consider if this makes sense. Have a look on the other side. Why do we put off the really important things, and get lost in what Michael Gerber calls “doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it!” Dr. Steven Covey of “Seven Habits” fame made it clear. If you divided your tasks into the 4 groups below, which order do you think you’d tackle them in? And, of course, the Important But Not Urgent tasks each represent a major opportunity ignored. Why we do it? Covey’s explanation: If it’s urgent and important, that’s a no-brainer. But, the category of Not Important is less consequential, perhaps less confronting than Important, so we do the easy stuff, numbers 2 and 3 next, save number 4 for last!

Read More

When I first started my business, I had a business mentor who told me the following quote. I’ve never forgotten it because it’s so true for many, many business owners. He said:

“Show me an entrepreneur and I’ll show you a manic-depressant.”

How true is that? One moment as a business owner, you can be on top of the world and nothing can go wrong. The next, you’re down in the doldrums thinking that a job could really be great right about now. And all it can take to change your mood is literally a phone call or an email.

The problem is that as a small business owner it’s far too easy to find yourself slipping into the hole of depression and once you’re there, it’s very hard to dig yourself out again. I know – I’ve been there.

The trick is to catch yourself when you start feeling down and put things in place again to lift your mood. Let’s face it, opportunities happen when you’re feeling great and clients start to come through the door. When you’re feeling down, nothing works and no new clients materialise. The hole is not a good place for you.

But, it’s all well and good me sat here saying to you that when you start feeling down you need to put things in place to stop you dropping into that hole. What if you’re already there though?

Well, if you’re already there, you need to try every trick in the book to pull yourself out. Here are my top ten tricks and tips that have worked for me in the past:

1. At the end of every day, force yourself to think of three good things that have happened. You’re not allowed to concentrate on any bad things. The good things can be as minor as you like – i.e. had a good meal with my partner, but they must be good.

Read More

While there is a lot of talk about the recession being over, there is an equal amount of talk about it not being over yet. This, by and large, comes down to perspective. There are numerous definitions of perspective; one that comes to mind is: what you see depends on where you sit. Many of the conclusions made from this are nothing more than a set of distortions. So what is perspective? We often hear executives saying that the people who report to them “need to get some perspective”, and then it is anyone’s guess as to what that might mean.

Perspective is a little more than simply seeing something from a particular point of view. Take the story of David and Goliath for example. We have two armies sizing each other up; in fact they had been doing this for a number of days. We have seasoned soldiers contemplating their possible death at the hand of a nine foot giant, a huge chunk of a man; they were all focusing on the size of this Goliath fellow in relation to their size. They were attempting to design a strategy based on the size of their opponent… in relation to their size. You can appreciate the inherent problems in doing that. Then along comes David. Who was, apparently, not a very large man. The first thing out of his mouth is; more or less: lets go for it… you can’t miss a target that big.

The very asset Goliath held most esteemed as the best advantage over his adversary was his size, the best quality he could use to intimidate and threaten his enemy into submission was his size; and he could back that up with a whole load of very loud propaganda. He was very good at shouting his mouth off. David looked at that same evidence and saw it as his greatest advantage. You can’t miss something that big and that noisy… you could probably hit that much noise in the dark.

Okay so what is my point?

Read More

Experienced trainers use a variety of training aids throughout their training programs. These include models, simulations, diagrams, mnemonics, reminder cards, templates, and so on. All of these are designed to assist trainees in the learning process. However, learning does not finish at the conclusion of the training program. In fact, for some training programs, work quality and efficiency will actually worsen immediately after the training. This is normal as employees stumble in their first applications of the newly learned skills.

Unfortunately, at this point, many managers give up and either overtly or covertly discourage further employee practice and experimentation. By providing and encouraging the use of job aids, you can help ease the anxiety felt by employees and get them up and running more quickly. Many training aids that are used during training are ideal for replication in the work environment. Think of these job aids as a way of extending the training room into the workplace.

Implementing job aids is especially useful when the task is complex, performed infrequently, carries high risk or uses an extensive or changing knowledge base. On the other hand, do not implement an on-the-job aid if the employee is required to perform the task automatically, without conscious deliberation or assistance.

Below, I have categorized ten types of training aid that you can usefully export from your training program. I have also included examples from previous programs that I have conducted or have seen others use successfully. If you see a job aid that you feel could be useful and it is not currently used in your training program, then make it so. You could even turn the creation of the job aid into a learning experience itself. At a suitable juncture in your program (following a theory session, for example), lead participants into an exercise in which they create the aid that they will use in their own workplaces.

Read More