by Jamie Schroder | March 11, 2020 | Blog

Employers and employees widely agree that training positively impacts productivity, employee turnover and satisfaction. In fact, according to a LinkedIn study, 94 percent of employees would stay at a company longer if there was an investment in learning.

Despite the known importance, many organizations struggle with training. Tightened budgets often limit, or prevent, the availability of full-time training personnel. When this is the case, new employee and skills training falls on supervisors and subject matter experts (SMEs), often without providing them any guidance on learning theory or best practices.

It is possible for organizations to provide effective training without experienced trainers. Often just addressing a few commonly made mistakes can be the difference between training struggle and training success. Here we list common mistakes trainers make and how to overcome them:

1. Overlooking “The Why”

A common mistake trainers make is focusing on “how,” when what they really need to emphasize is “why.” Though knowing how to perform the task is important, adults hold onto information based on the why. This seems obvious, but SME’s often focus solely on the process, because that is what they know.

BEST PRACTICES

• Start with the “why”. Why are they learning this? Why is this point important? Why will this help them in their job? It might be as simple as telling them: “This is going to make your job easier, better or faster!”
• Identify common critical errors or pain points in the process and emphasize the why behind following the process to avoid them.
• Use real world examples that demonstrate the why. Emotion, action and consequence-based stories illustrate why something is important to learn.