Conclusion

I hoped, when writing this book, that the troubleshooting tips provided wouldn’t just help you out when you found yourself in some kind of trouble, but that they could help you to proactively avoid getting into trouble in the first place. Particularly, I hope that by utilizing some of the strategies outlined in this book, you will be able to avoid common mistakes that new trainers often make.

I put together this nonscientific list of the top 10 mistakes new trainers make in response to a request from one of my Learning Design Fundamentals students. To compile it, I asked several colleagues for their thoughts, read some articles and trainers’ blog posts, and then filtered in my own experience. The mistakes are listed with the more serious and prevalent ones at the bottom and the less consequential and less common at the top. More about how to avoid these mistakes can be found in the challenges listed at the end of each mistake.

10. Failing to rehearse synchronous training

Practicing your workshop aloud—whether with colleagues or all alone—prior to facilitating it helps you master the content, improve your flow, and increase your comfort. (See Challenge 29.)

9. Not varying your learning activities

If all content and all learners were the same, then approaching every course with the same types of activities would make sense, but this is hardly the case. Customize the learning, and capitalize on the innumerable ways to transmit information across multiple sessions and within each individual session, or your training will be deadly dull. (See Challenge 18.)

8. Holding training when it’s convenient

Some organizations schedule training events for off-cycle, or “down,” times. This might make sense from a productivity standpoint, but not necessarily from a learning standpoint. Offering training on a prescribed schedule limits the effectiveness of the training—because learners may not have opportunity to employ the new knowledge, skills, and attitudes for some time—and is a costly mistake. Customized, just-in-time training, on the other hand, makes sense instructionally and economically. (See Challenges 9 and 10.)

7. Having unclear objectives or outcomes

In my first training job, I conducted a pilot program. The feedback I got was generally good; people liked the program, but they told me to scrap it and start again. This was extremely embarrassing, and I learned an important lesson, as I frantically spent the next few weeks (and weekends) revising my work. Why didn’t they want to run with my enjoyable and well-written training? Because it wasn’t clear what outcomes it was trying to achieve. I designed activities that worked for the content, but that didn’t necessarily support the behavioral, measurable outcomes the organization was seeking. (See Challenge 17.)

6. Leaving on-the-job learning to chance

Trainers spend a lot of time focusing on their formal learning offerings, at the expense of all the learning that happens back on the job. Especially in our information-rich world, we can’t limit ourselves to providing stellar classroom and online training and ignore vastly important experiential learning, and learning that comes from coaching and feedback or digital resources. Live training events are only one facet of learning and development, and anyone who is still thinking about only that facet will be left behind, and so will their learners. Similarly, if design of those live trainings stops when participants walk out the door, and you don’t pay attention to the majority of learning that takes place after a training event, you’re just letting all of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes you’ve imparted go directly into the forgetting curve. You need to design for the work environment learners will return to following those events. (See Challenge 23.)

5. Leaving evaluation as an afterthought

If you need to measure the value of your programs (and you do!), then you must consider measurement all the way from your initial analysis of a training request through the design and development of your program. Training programs need to be tied to the desired performance you want to see on-the-job and so you need to identify what that behavior is and how you will measure it early on. Then design your training to lead to the desired results. Throwing together an evaluation strategy after the training has been developed will not be effective. (See Challenges 25–28.)

4. Not getting management on board

Getting organizational leaders, and the individuals who supervise your learners, engaged with—and excited about—your offerings is critical to help generate participant buy-in, build credibility for your team, increase your learning budget, and, most important, ensure that learners are supported when they return to their jobs and need to apply what they’ve learned. (See Challenges 6 and 7.)

3. Putting too much material or content into your training

Organizational leaders and training requesters will continue to want to squeeze as much content as possible into each encounter—synchronous or asynchronous—with employees. Subject matter experts will insist that every aspect of their topic is useful and important information (and it may be!). Many topics are complex and could be the subject of days or weeks, not hours, of study. New trainers often don’t push back hard enough on client and stakeholder demands when they might actually interfere with learning. As learning professionals, it is our role to educate clients and stakeholders about concepts like cognitive overload, working memory, the forgetting curve, and adult learning principles, so that we deliver content that is digestible, at an appropriate level of struggle, and effective in the long term. (See Challenges 17 and 20.)

2. Teaching the way you learn best, or the way you were taught

This mistake applies to both workshop design and delivery. If you learn best by talking in groups, for example, your design will include quite a bit of group discussion, and your facilitation style will have you suggesting participants turn to one another every time you want to explore a concept. But the platinum rule is most effective here, not the golden rule. Rather than teach others as you would wish to be taught, teach others as they would wish to be taught—and in a manner that is instructionally sound. (See Challenge 16.)

1. Providing training when the problem can’t be solved with training

Not doing a thorough assessment of training requests that come your way—or not feeling you can say no to a request as someone just starting out in the field—leads to the number-one mistake I’ve found that new trainers make. Jillian Hintz, senior manager of learning design and development at Paycor, is the learning professional I’ve come across who gets the most requests—about one a day! Of these, she says about 40 percent are legitimate. That means that 60 percent of the requests coming through her door aren’t actually training problems. Think about how detrimental it would be if her team just jumped in and started executing on all of these requests, only to discover later that the problems weren’t ones that they had any ability to affect, or that simply were not appropriate for an L&D team! One of the best ways that training professionals add value is doing a careful analysis and respectfully pushing back on requests that will be costly for organizations and learners alike. (See Challenge 15.)

One last thought: This book is focused on challenges and mistakes. Adults learn best from a problem-solving focus, and I wanted to present concepts through that lens. At the same time, I don’t want you to think that becoming a trainer is a problem, or that every aspect of your job will be a challenge.

New trainers I speak to have more positive things to say about the field of L&D than they do negative things. Here are some samples:

Learning and development is a wonderful field, and I hope that you will enjoy almost every minute of it. And, for those minutes when you don’t, I hope that this book will be a useful resource. May your challenges be few—and may you find the passion, excitement, and pride that these fellow new trainers describe. All the best to you!