Gone are the days of being sent away from the office for days on end to get your staff trained. In todays society we do everything from banking to shopping online, so why not save time and money by training your team online too. Great! But what about keeping your team engaged during the process, won’t they get bored and skim over the material?
Anyone can open up a training program and click next through to the quiz page, but how many of those people have learned something from the experience? If your team are not engaged with the content, you could be left open to mistakes that could cost you substantial amounts of time and money. One of the most important parts of compiling any training programs on or offline is keeping your team learning and excited about the experience.
It’s not hard to put together an engaging online training experience, and we are going to take a look at some great tips on how to create a fun and rewarding experience for both you, and your team.
Make it relevant
There is nothing worse that sitting through a 3-hour long program only to find out that there was half an hour of material relevant to your position. With the use of a good learning management system, you can now easily create fully customizable courses in no time at all. Break your training program up into a series of shorter modules that can be slotted into a range of programs so your team only needs to complete the sections that are relevant to them. This not only keeps your staff more engaged, but gets your team back to work quicker saving you time and money.
Tell a story
Every night people head home and turn on their TV. Why? Because they like stories. Not only that, by presenting information in a story format it helps the student to develop logical connections between information, and increases the ability to remember details throughout the process. Stories are great for business or a group of students due to the fact that they can be easily molded around different concepts to create a range of scenarios relevant to your learning area.
Mix it up
When you walking into to training and get handed what feels like a ream of paper at the time, you are immediately disheartened. With the amount of technology available in the world today, it’s crazy to not take advantage of the options available and mix up your program. There are a number of things that you can incorporate, from video interviews and role playing, through to audio segment and interactive testing. The options are all there and easy to use, so make the most of them and mix things up!
Keep it moving
In a world where we the average attention span is growing shorter and shorter, it’s harder than every to hold a student’s attention in the classroom. Rather than try to push through, why not adapt your program to suit the modern way of consuming information. Breaking your material up into a series of short modules give the impression that the student is moving quickly through the program and keeps them engaged. Also, by staggering your program and only setting targets of a few modules a week keeps the program moving, and lets the student absorb the information without being overloaded and drawn away from their primary role for large periods of time.
Make it fun and rewarding
There aren’t many better motivators for people than turning something into a competition and putting some rewards in place. Everyone loves winning something no matter how big, or small the rewards. This can be as simple as starting a program where the team that completes the most modules with the highest average test score wins a free lunch, or an social outing at the end of the month. Everyone loves winning something, and that can be coupled with building some great team culture along the way then everybody wins!
I hope these tips have been helpful with planning your next training program. Remember an engaged team is an educated and efficient team!
Happy learning!
