10 Tips to Improve Training Sessions

Investing in employee training is vital to attracting and retaining the best talent out there. But we don’t mean holding a week-long workshop or giving your employees a thick pile of modules to read. What your team needs is an effective training program that will have an impact on their performance and help them advance in their chosen field. Follow this list of tips to improve training sessions and make sure that they stick to your learners. 

1. Make training accessible to everyone

The first tip to improve your training session is to make training accessible to everyone. Gone are the days when training could only be done by gathering everyone in the same room and forcing everyone to sit and listen for hours. With new technology sweeping through modern businesses, it’s now possible to make training available online and to everyone. You can even adopt a blended learning strategy should you wish to combine the best of both worlds and offer online and face-to-face training to your learners. 

Setting up a blended training session isn’t exactly rocket science. Training by SafetyCulture, an online learning tool, has a lot of learning features that can help you reduce the overall admin time needed to manage and organize your training. This way, you can focus on more important things like creating content or measuring training results.

Among these useful features is its built-in authoring tool, which can help you put together computer-based training materials in just minutes. You can also use some of their ready-made courses, so you no longer have to start from scratch. These courses vary from frontline training courses, workplace compliance courses, safety training programs, and more.

While they were designed for online learning, you can always go through them with your learners in real time and explain the lessons in detail. Think of it as a book or module that they can read while you’re discussing a topic, only these courses are accessible through their laptops or mobile devices.

You’ll also find the Group Training feature extremely useful for your blended training. It allows you to track and deliver in-person training to your team without going through a time-consuming process. All you need to do is ask them to scan a QR code, and from there, you can run your team training and review in-person attendance.

Improve your training session by using the best blended learning tool today! Try SafetyCulture’s Training today for free.

2. Set training objectives

Training objectives define what a learner will learn or achieve as a result of their training. Setting these goals is a good way to add structure to your training; otherwise, it will just turn into a huge mess. This is mostly because training objectives serve as a guide to make sure that your team’s learning progress is right on track.

As important as choosing from different training methods and setting training objectives, it’s also crucial that you communicate them to your team. Explain the things to be achieved and how they will be able to use them in their day-to-day work. It’s a good way to improve learning retention rate, and motivate them to participate and engage more in their training.

3. Shorten training

Losing the attention of learners is one of the biggest nightmares of most trainers and L&D professionals. But the good news is that you can fight it off and keep your team’s attention span intact. The trick here is to to have employee training programs that will deliver training content in short bursts, a technique known as microlearning.

Break down your training content into topical, bite-sized chunks that your learners can easily digest and follow. Plus, focus only on the key elements of any subject area to increase the likelihood of knowledge being transferred to the memory of your learners 

If you’re unsure how to make your learning short but still relevant, you can check Training’s micro-courses to get some inspiration. All their courses are divided into short, sharp, and highly focused lessons, which learners can finish in just minutes. They’re also designed to respond perfectly to any desktop or smartphone, so learners can take it anytime using the device they prefer.

4. Invest in quality training

Another great tip to improve training sessions is to invest in high-quality training. You can’t just ask your team to attend a webinar or give them learning materials and then call it good training. It must be relevant and effective, or you’ll just end up wasting their time. 

Invest in high-quality training where your employees will truly learn something and apply that knowledge or skill to improve the quality of their daily work tasks. Consider exploring various online course platforms, such as explored in this Attrock list, to zero in on the best fit for your organization. For face-to-face training programs, you might want to consider looking for a great instructor who can effectively explain new concepts or strategies to your learners. You don’t necessarily have to outsource and overspend for an instructor. You can appoint your most experienced and talented employees and ask them to share their knowledge with the rest of their team. 

5. Incorporate games 

Learning doesn’t have to be dry and dull. If you don’t want your learners to disengage from their training, then you might want to consider adding some game elements to it. This strategy is called gamification. 

Gamification is all about adding a fun aspect to learning so learners will be more enthusiastic to learn and participate. It also promotes healthy competition, which is a good motivator for them to perform better and keep up with the performance of their teammates.

Training by SafetyCulture has a lot of gamification tools that can help you spice up your training and make sure that your learners engage with the content authentically. For one, they have a range of game-based templates that allow you to create quizzes in the form of smartphone games, like Jeopardy, find-a-word, image/word match, and letter jumble.

6. Set a training schedule

In case you’re holding live classes or face-to-face training, it’s highly recommended that you arrange an effective schedule. Set a start time that works for everyone, and estimate how long the training will run. And most importantly, stick to this schedule. The last thing you want is to frustrate your team because you extended the training for too long. 

As for online learning, setting deadlines will help learners prioritize their training. And that doesn’t mean they’ll lose the freedom to learn at their own pace. You can still allow them to take their training whenever and wherever they want, until the end date you’ve set for each course. 

7. Test learners frequently

Testing your learners frequently is also a great tip to improve training sessions. Needless to say, tests and quizzes are the best way to know whether or not your team has successfully retained the lessons and achieved their training goals.

Training offers an online quiz maker feature called Rapid Refresh that allows you to create multiple-style quizzes. You can send these assessments repeatedly to learners until it’s locked in their long-term memory.

8. Include cross-department training

The object of cross-department training is to familiarize everyone in your team with the roles and responsibilities of other departments. It can be done through job shadowing or job rotation, or you can initiate activities that will allow them to collaborate on a specific task. 

When done correctly, this type of training can do wonders for the company. Cross-department training can help expand one’s subject-matter knowledge and skill and allow your company to function better as a team. When everyone is aware of the role of each other, you’ll never have to worry when someone’s off sick or on leave since you have a strong team who can take on the task. 

It also prevents organizational silos, or the unhealthy culture where everyone is working in a kind of bubble and hesitates to share information across different parts of the company. With cross-department training, you’ll see improved productivity as it will be easier for everyone to look for the best person for a certain task and collaborate with them. 

9. Evaluate training effectiveness

Tracking your training evaluation metrics is the best way to determine whether or not you’re getting the most out of the training you’ve spent days preparing for. Learning your team’s assessment scores, course completion rate, time spent for each lesson, and type of content they visit the most will show you how effective your training is and how you can further improve the next time. It will also help you identify employees who need further training, so you can give them the support they need to improve their soft-skills, hard-skills, and performance. 

You’re in luck because SafetyCulture’s Training includes a powerful analytics suite that can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your employee training and development program.

10. Get learners’ feedback

The last tip to improve training sessions is to get your learners’ feedback. Did your learners find the training helpful for their role? Were they able to apply it to their work and improve their performance? Did they enjoy the course? The answers to these questions will determine the effectiveness of your training straight from the perspective of your learners. Getting their feedback is also an important indicator of the types of training you should provide your team in the future, as well as the content you should include in your lessons. 

Training by SafetyCulture offers a range of visually appealing survey templates that you can use to collect feedback from your learners. One of the templates you might find useful is its free text survey template, which can include opinion-based answers like comments and suggestions. 

There’s also a slider template, which you can use to check how much your training has benefitted your learners in numbers. If you want to know which of the courses they find the most helpful, then you might find the basic multiple-answer question template an interesting choice.

No need to go through clunky spreadsheets. All answers from these surveys will be automatically recorded in the analytics tab, under the survey questions. If further analysis of the raw data is needed, you can export the survey results to CSV.