These are the Mistakes you MUST Avoid in Employee Training

The success of your company is directly dependent on how competent your employees are at doing their job. Employees with previous experience in the exact field that they are going to be working in at your company will generally have no problem with keeping up with their workload, but you won’t always get lucky with this type of employee. More often than not, you’re going to get a worker that, while qualified, has no previous experience with the type of work he or she is going to be performing, and so they’ll probably need someone to show them the ropes, as they say.

Because of this, it’s often necessary to have some kind of training program for new employees, a program that will be able to properly educate them and give them all the necessary abilities for the work they are going to be doing in the company. Now, creating a solid training program and properly putting it into practice is no easy feat, so educators often tend to make mistakes. Fortunately, these mistakes can be anticipated – you are far from the first person to have made them – and rectified before they cause any problems for the employees taking the training. In this post, we want to talk about some of the most common mistakes that educators make when putting a training program into practice, so without further ado, here they are.

Too Much Information

One of the most common mistakes that educators make when first initiating the training program is that they overwhelm the trainees with a bunch of info. And no matter how well you categorize it, you’ve got to realize that the human brain is really not that good at remembering different types of information during a short period of time. It’s a bit like when you listen to someone explain the rules to a board game you’ve never played before – you kind of absorb some of the info, the gist of it if you will, but you won’t really get it all down until you actually sit down and play the game. And you’ll certainly need to be reminded of the details more than once.

So, rather than bombard your students with all kinds of information and hoping that they’ll soak in the most important stuff, it’s better to just give them only the most important stuff at first, and then build up from there.

Failing to Motivate

Any time that we try to learn something new, our minds will immediately go to the question: “How can I use this information? Is this really something that I will need in my work?”

And as an educator, you really need to be aware of this fact and adapt your material so that your students always know why they’re learning whatever they’re learning. Lots of different examples are always good because they make the material of the employee training program tangible for the trainees and enable them to see the value of what they are trying to learn.

Lack of Communication

It’s important to realize that we as people are all different in terms of how quickly and efficiently we can learn a new skill. Some will pick it up pretty quickly, others might need more time, and what might seem like child’s play to one person can prove significantly more challenging to another, and vice versa. Because of this, it’s important to always keep in contact with your students and be aware of how well they’re mastering the material, and clear up any uncertainties that they might have over any subject.

Also, encourage your students to ask as many questions as they find necessary. Asking questions about one’s uncertainties not only clears up the uncertainty, but it is also a much more active and involved learning process than simply listening to a lecture. By involving oneself in a conversation with the lecturer, one’s attention span is significantly more powerful, and so it’s far more likely that the student will remember whatever it is that the question was about in the long-term.

Large Groups

The larger the group of trainees is, the harder it is to keep a sustainable level of communication between the students and the teacher. It is, therefore, good practice to keep this number to about a dozen or even fewer than that. The fewer people there are, the more effective the training will be unless you use some kind of software aided training program that can keep up with any number of trainees.

Using our knowledge testing software GetCertified, for example, it is absolutely possible to teach a large group of people at the same time, but only because you’re aided by a powerful computer program. If you want to keep the lesson as organic as possible, however, the number of participants is definitely something that you should keep under control.

Generic Training

Humans like diversity – we always have, and the less diverse a subject or lecture is, the more effort we need to put in to keep our focus and attention. This is why generic lectures that are always initiated and conducted in the same way will undoubtedly fail at educating your employees properly. Make sure that your classroom atmosphere is as dynamic as the training will allow, and you’ll find that it is much easier to keep trainee’s attention, and ultimately allow them to produce better results at the end of the training.

Summary

That about covers all of the most important mistakes you should always look out for when conducting employee training. To sum up, you need to make sure not to overload your students with a lot of information, make sure that your lessons are meaningful and motivating to your students. It’s also important to limit the number of trainees taking the training at the same time and encourage the students to initiate communication with the teacher in the form of questions. And lastly, make sure that your lectures are interesting and diverse, as that is way more likely to keep a trainee’s attention and thus help them master the material a lot better. Good luck!