How to Make a Training Plan
A business has to ensure that its employees know all of the proper procedures that will allow them to perform their duties in the way that they are expected. By allowing employees to understand what they should do and how they should go about doing it, then businesses will run much smoother. This is why employers, or the people that they assign to the task, have to come up with employee training plans that will outline what and how these employees should be taught. This article is going to teach you how to make a training plan that will ensure your employees will learn everything that they need to know.
Training Plan Template
How to create your training plan
Although this may take a lot of your time and it is generally demanding, creating a training plan for your employees will definitely be rewarding. There are a lot of details and requirements that you will have to pay close attention to, so do not let that deter you. By thoroughly preparing for your training session and engaging the audience, you can ensure that it will be engaging, entertaining, and educational for those who are participating in it. So, here are the steps that you have to follow to create an efficient training plan for your business:
1. Choose the best time and location for your training plan
Find a place that will be able accommodate all of the people who will be attending your training program and make sure that it has enough seating. When you are choosing the location of where you would like to hold the training session, you have to think about the number of people that you are inviting. If it is only for a small number of people, then getting a space that is large enough should not be much of a problem. However, if it is an open training session that anyone can attend, then you will need to come up with a rough estimate as to how many people will likely show up and space that will fit all of them. As soon as you are able to find a great space, then you will have to reserve it for your training well ahead of time
2. Plan your goals for the presentation
An important part of creating a good presentation is by figuring out what the goals of your presentation should be. Usually, you would think about what the company needs when you are creating the goals for your presentation. So, this means that you have to find the key points that you want to make so that the audience should be able to understand and see their importance. Your presentation should cover the following three main goals of a training session:
- Make sure that your learning outcomes are as specific and as clear as possible
- Make sure that your goals are measurable and not unreasonable. Be sure that these goals are things that your participants are able to achieve once the training has been completed.
- Do not present too much information during your presentation. Make sure that you share enough information to let the participants understand your point, but do not overwhelm them with too many details that may just end up confusing them.
3. Practice your presentation
It has always been stated that practice makes perfect. By practicing your presentation, you will be able to confidently deliver the material to your audience. You can also learn how best to pace the presentation or you may be able to find sections of your presentation that you can improve upon changing, or ones that you can remove entirely. If you practice, then there should not be any problems regarding how you are going to relay whatever information you want to share.
- You can practice alone until you have gotten a good understanding of how you want to present, or you can have a friend help you out by allowing him or her to have a preview of your presentation.
- Pay careful attention to the introduction and conclusion of your presentation as these two will set the bar for your audience.
- It is best that you include visual aids in your presentation so that you will have a good feel as to how long it is going to take, and so that you can ensure that your audience has something that their eyes can use to absorb information rather than just relying on their ears.
4. Prepare the hand-out materials
Chances are that you may need to distribute materials that will cover the topics that were discussed during the employee training session. By giving your employees hand outs, they will be able to better understand everything that has been discussed and they can go over the topics whenever they please, ensuring that they have no excuse for not learning anything that was presented during the training session.
- You should always consider handing out copies of any presentation that you have given.
- Diagrams and fact sheets can be a great addition to the material handed out.
- There are some training plans that already come with the necessary materials for your audience, but it is always best to prepare your own, just in case.
5. Prepare all of the visual aids you need
If you think that your presentation needs visual aids, then you have to prepare them ahead of time. It is highly suggested that you create visual aids for your presentation as they are great ways to represent information to those who are participating in the training session. Using these visual aids can also help your audience understand and retain whatever information you are trying to present. There are a lot of visual aids that you can use such as charts, videos, or images that will make your points easy to get across and understand. Not only that, having visual aids just makes the presentation more appealing and less boring for the audience and that, in turn, will make them more engaged in your presentation.
- Make sure that your visuals are as clean and as simple as possible. Do not overwhelm your trainees with images or text that will just end up confusing your audience and make sure that whatever text in your visual aid has the right size of font so that your audience will easily be able to read its contents.
- During your rehearsals and practices, make sure that you include whatever visual aids you have. Doing this will give you a better idea on how to introduce your visual aids to the audience as well as how you will go about in using them
- Just because you have visual aids does not mean that you are going to fully rely on them. You want to hand information to the audience, but if you are just going to let the visual aids do the work, then you are not really needed now, are you? Make sure that there is a good balance between how you use the visual aids and how you share information through verbal communication to the audience
6. Do not hand out materials while using visual aids
If you plan on presenting any information with the help of a visual aid, then do not distribute information or hand-outs at the same time. If you do this, then it will just end up with your audience getting distracted and missing out on some of the key points of your presentation. Remember that the best time to give hand-outs to participants in the training session is only after your presentation and not during the session.
- Instead of giving the hand-outs after the presentation, you can also decide to distribute them before the presentation starts. This way, the audience will have a better understanding of what you are discussing and they will also be able to set expectations with regards to what they are going to learn before the presentation has even begun.
- Make sure that your audience is focused on the visual aids the moment that they are presented during the training.
7. Have a backup in place
Let us say that you stored your presentation in a USB stick, but then it breaks down with all of your files in it. Something like this would be devastating to people who have spent hours trying to make a presentation that needs to be given during important events. This is why you should always have a backup of your presentation or have other means of presenting the information you have during a particular training session.
8. Put your audience first
Once you have practiced and prepared for the upcoming training session, then the next thing that you have to focus on is the audience who will be participating in it. They are the main reason why you are having a training session in the first place, so this means you have to find methods where you will be able to engage them properly in a way that you will be able to efficiently share information.
- When you start handing off information, do not be nervous. Remind yourself of your preparation and that those attending are people who want to learn about what you have to share, so use that as a means to get you through.
9. Monitor your audience
While you are presenting the information during your training session, you should also keep a close eye on the people that are participating. Keep an eye out to see how they are responding to your presentation. Does it seem like they are falling asleep? Are they engaged enough? Does it look like they are confused with what you’re sharing? Adjust your presentation to keep your audience engaged, interested, and informed all at the same time.
- Take a good look at the body language of your audience. If they are fidgeting or if they are looking at the clock often, then it means that they have no interest in your presentation.
- Judge how attentive your audience is during your training session. If they look distracted, then do what you can to take back their attention.
10. Evaluate your presentation
You should implement a method wherein those that have taken part in your presentation are able to give you proper feedback. This way, you will be able to gather information regarding what you should change and improve for future sessions. While it can be difficult to learn how your presentation fared objectively, there are a number of methods that can help you figure out what these people were able to learn what and the things that they did not learn.
- Distribute training surveys once the training session has been completed. These are evaluations that will let participants give you proper feedback. If you want them to provide you with more honest answers, then it is best to give them the option to remain anonymous.
- You can also consider handing out a form of test at the end of your presentation. This is one way of seeing just how much information your audience was able to retain, or if there were problems in your presentation that prevented your audience from learning what they needed to know.
- Having a small group project can help by allowing your audience the opportunity to demonstrate everything that they were able to learn in a hands-on way. Just remember that this kind of method may not be the best as some members might rely more on others, but it is also one way to get employees to engage with one another and share what was learned.
If you would like to learn more about how to create a training plan or anything related to this particular topic, then all you have to do is go through our available articles until you are able to acquire the information that you require.
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