NYNP blog post 3-24-09

What is good training design?

Good training design = when there's nothing left to take out.

Today I attended an excellent, free lunchtime webinar hosted by InSync Training (see my prior blog post "Free resource for learning how to conduct training online" for info about these webinars). The facilitator was Jane Bozarth of www.bozarthzone.com, the co-facilitator was Kassy LaBorie of www.insynctraining.com, and the webinar shared the title of one of Bozarth's books, Better than Bullet Points: Creating Engaging E-Learning with PowerPoint.

Ms. Bozarth shared the rule of thumb above for good training design. What did she mean?

When a trainer or instructional designer (I'll just say "trainer" for simplicity) approaches material that needs to go into a training - whether e-learning, webinar, or classroom-based training - the trainer needs to start by thinking: What are the key objectives for the training? And what is extraneous information that confuses the point?

In order to keep participants focused on the learning objectives, the trainer needs to cut away all of the extraneous information, so that what's left is clearly related to the objectives. Once the material has been cut down to the essential information, the trainer needs to consider how to present the information in a way that's tied to real world behavior change on the job. Then, just as the raw material needs to be cut down to the essential, the activities and training materials must also be cut down. Irrelevant PowerPoint slides, handouts, graphics, text, colors, animations, activities, etc. must be cut away, so that the training content that's left is clearly related to the objectives.

This process can be deceptively time-consuming. For nonprofit trainers doing a lot more with a lot less right now, it can be easier to just dump everything we can think of into training, rather than taking the time to sort through the content and focus it. However, if we don't create clear and effective training the first time, we may end up having to redo it, so in the end it can save time to do this right. And, if we implement good training design that leads to quality service and performance towards our organizations' missions, our clients will be the ultimate beneficiaries.