Delivery Matters

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5 most useful free online sources for training activities

Good icebreakers, exercises, and energisers are essential for an engaging and effective training. It takes careful consideration to choose the right activities for your training, the ones that will fit perfectly with your learning objectives, group size, the profile of participants, and the time available. UPDATE We have added 4 more links that you, our readers recommended, so be sure to check them out at the end of the article. You may already have your favourite exercises for different training topics, but as you deliver more and more training, you do not want to use the same ones over and over again. Refreshing your exercises is good for experimenting with…

What did the year 2014 bring?

We are reaching the end of 2014 - a year that brought big steps forward for TrainedOn, even if it felt like a big rollercoaster ride sometimes. Looking back at where have we been a year ago, we have a smile on our face when seeing regular user activity in TrainedOn and increased anticipation to build it further. Behind the scenes the past year was almost entirely spent in remote working by our team, which brought new challenges to tackle. In this post we want to reflect on what have we achieved, and what have we learnt about the market and running our company. At a glance: TrainedOn has grown from…

Trainers and coaches in the Netherlands: Share your digital tools and technologies used in training

Inspired by a recent blog post on lack of digital tools to support trainers and in our effort to promote sharing of practices and tips between trainers, we are organizing a first trainers’ meet up in the Netherlands. You can find below the description of the event and register on facebook or meetup.com. How can technology get you into the flow when preparing and delivering your training? How can you save time when managing your training? Technology brings plenty of opportunities for different professions, but what about the training field? Come, see and share your experience on how digital technologies can help trainers in their work. We would like to present some…

Where TrainedOn is heading to?

TrainedOn is stepping out of beta phase after the past months of testing and development. We are introducing a tiered pricing model and focusing on developing long-requested new features. Scroll below if you want to read more on how we arrived here and what is ahead. There has been a lot going on here at TrainedOn since the last time we peeked what is behind the scenes during our 2013 year review. Our team finishes the last touches on integrating payments as we speak, which signals the end of the free beta period of the past months. So how did we get here? I still vividly recall the excitement of…

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…

2013 in review

We have passed into 2014, and besides the great wishes for the upcoming year, it is an opportunity to reflect on what happened with us in the past year. The year 2013 was a breakthrough for us. The side-project we started doing as a hobby turned into an actual business that engaged us fully and showed we have the potential to make an impact on the world. We started with having a simple landing page, a logo, and a team with many plans. Now we are looking forward to 2014 after we launched a new landing page and our blog, had awesome meetings all over Europe, moved to Tallinn, founded…

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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…

TrainedOn moved to Tallinn

We have been quiet for some time, but things are about to change. We recently moved to Tallinn as we got selected for a startup accelerator - Startup Wise Guys. Finally we are in one place and fully dedicated to work on TrainedOn in order to develop a valuable service for the training community. First two and a half weeks have passed by extremely fast mainly due to so much activities and energy. The greatest value of the accelerator for us is the network it provides. Starting with the mentors and investors that we meet, who guide us with the right questions, pieces of advice and play around with the…

Welcome to Delivery Matters!

Here you will find stories written by a team of young trainers with a common background in a youth organisation, who are passionate about education and lifelong learning. We are also excited about technology and we always try to see how it can help us in what we do. Over the years we have tried various tools in preparing our training content. We used mind maps for brainstorming and creating quick outlines, text documents for writing down specific procedures and spreadsheets for training schedules. These tools may be good enough for a specific task, but not for iterating them in an collaborative manner. And training preparation is exactly that, an…

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