Top 5 Tips for Running Engaging Business Training Sessions

At some point in many of our lives we will have to train fellow colleagues or in some cases businesses on the best way to complete a task. For example how to use a bespoke system in your office that a new person may not have previously used or if you are an expert in digital marketing you could be a teaching a business the best way to promote themselves successfully on the latest social media platform.

Training can sometimes be very daunting especially as the people that you are interacting with are all expecting you to supply them with new information they have never heard before therefore here are some of the top tips that you can use in order to leave your audience satisfied with their training.

Knowing your audience is extremely important when preparing yourself for a training session as it will allow you to design your training session to meet the people attending needs rather than having a general training session that could alienate some of your audience and bore others.

For example if you were training a managing director it would be safe to say they will already know the basics to what you are training but are looking for niche pieces of information or advanced details into a program that improves their understanding.

When presenting to a group of people confidence is one of the most important factors in order for your training session to be a success, even though it can sometimes be one of the hardest things to achieve.

The reason confidence is important to a training session no matter what level of training you are providing is people are attending to gain your knowledge on a subject matter as you are an expert in that particular field. Therefore if you don’t exude confidence in the way you talk and in your posture then it becomes harder for your audience to accept you as an authority in your field and may not take away the full benefits of your training session.

This leads on from confidence you may be really confident about the subject you are training people in however if you have no passion about the subject that you are talking about then it could lead to people switching off half way through what you are training them in.

Showing passion about a particular topic helps the audience buy into what you are saying as they can see that you are enjoying training them in this subject matter and this can help them also enjoy themselves. The most important aspect of getting an audience to enjoy themselves is they are far likely to remember the information they have learnt as it will be remembered as a positive rather than an arduous morning or afternoon.

Another way to ensure that your audience is paying attention to what you are training them in is to involve them in the training session itself. One way you could accomplish this is by asking them questions before you give them the information for example the question ‘how do you think this is done?’ could be a good question to ask an audience. The reason this is an effective way of training people is it makes them think about what you are going to tell them before you do so this means when you do give them the information they are more likely to pay attention to it.

In addition another way this is effective is asking the audience their views gives them a sense of importance as it makes them feel like their view is valued. This is likely to increase the chances of you gaining a rapport with your audience.

Testing your audience is a highly effective training strategy to make sure that your audience has paid attention to your session. Personally I think one of the best ways to accomplish this is letting your audience know at the start of a training session there will be a test at the end this will instantly make your audience pay more attention as they know if they don’t then they will fail the test at the end.

Audience response systems are becoming a highly popular way in which presenters are testing people in training sessions as it they do not require their audience to have to write long answers to questions via pen and pad. Instead they can be integrated into the presentation slides as multiple choice questions and the audience only has to click a button to respond. An audience response system can also be used by the trainer as it allows them to store the results of their training session on their computer. This gives you the ability to analyse the answers that are given to you and could highlight any areas you need to work on in your training session.

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