Delivery Matters

Stories behind workshop plans,
sticky notes and markers.

Author: Kert Kivaste

Can online courses substitute classroom training in the corporate world?

You can sit in your cosy living room and learn JavaScript on Codeacademy or take Intro to Physics course on Udacity. You choose the topic, the time and the place – what’s there not to like? Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are great! They are great in the same way as books are great - fantastic collections of information that you can obtain whenever it’s suitable for you. However, they have been criticized a lot because of the low completion rate, which is around 10% on average. It might seem very low, though in many cases an online course is taken just to check out the new possibilities of online learning, without…

Why trainers don’t share?

While working on SessionLab we’ve had the chance to interview many experienced soft skills trainers and educators from around the world. We were discussing individual working habits and the training industry in general to better understand trainers’ needs and desires. We received honest but sometimes puzzling replies to our questions. When we touched the topic of sharing materials, almost all interviewees told us they are reluctant to share training materials with each other. Someone even admitted: “I don’t even share my training materials with my co-trainers”. Some others said: "Maybe I would share my materials, but I don’t think others would” A board member of an international NGO told us…

Trainer styles – don’t judge a book by it’s cover

Have you ever judged a trainer’s performance by how do her slides or flipcharts look like? Are there nice pictures included, or triggering messages written on them? Such visuals are only providing a superficial perspective of a training, they are only the ‘tip of the iceberg’: the slides and flips are there only to complete the learning objectives, to help passing on the main message. The real learning happens by doing exercises or by providing a new, triggering perspective about the given training topic, whilst also providing the space for reflection. In our practice as trainers we have met with two distinct styles of running a training: either a trainer…

Training preparation – the start of a training workflow

The key to a good training is preparation. General rule of thumb says, when preparing a standard training you should spend around 3 hours of preparation for 1 hour of training. And this just covers the average case, while if you are new to a given training topic or the topic is rather complex, the time spent can increase drastically. But what is considered preparation? The preparation can include communicating to your clients and/or participants, drafting the training outline, arranging the logistics, creating/updating the training materials, etc. If we take the mentioned formula, for a one day training workshop a good preparation would take 2-3 days. Can all these elements…

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