How to conduct a successful training class.
A lot of time, preparation, and creativity go into conducting a successful training class. The first thing that you must do is to decide what topic you will be teaching. It is important to choose a topic that is going to be beneficial and provide information that everyone attending, will be able to use. When you have chosen a topic, doing a lot of research helps in gathering all of the information that you will be sharing. Once you have gathered the information, you need to sort through it and limit your training to the ideas you find most important and helpful; this way your training will have focus. .
After having gathered the material, your next step is deciding how to present it. We all have horror stories of training classes where we were just read to from the instructor, this is not effective training! The most effective training is fun. When you combine games, interaction and multimedia formats into your class, it will be much more enjoyable. There are many books and websites available with different ideas for training games; utilizing these will have your participants thanking you! Some information can be gathered into crossword puzzles or word searches; you can play games like Jeopardy, with the information. It is best to keep things exciting with lots of questions and answers so that everyone can stay awake. .
One thing that you want to make sure you take into consideration is how your room is set up. I don't like a formal training room with rows of tables and chairs and the trainer at the front of the room. I would rather create a more social environment with everyone in a circle or horseshoe. This helps people relax, communicate and have fun. .
When the time for your class has arrived, the first thing everyone needs to do is get to know each other. To remember names, I have every participant attach an adverb to their name such as, Marvelous Michele, we go around the room introducing ourselves with our adverb, this helps our retention because we are focusing on the name for more time than we normally would.
