Creating an Effective Training
You may be wondering what makes a second-year Generalist qualified to talk about developing training… In less than a year at my current company, I have developed and implemented a training program on unconscious bias for our front-line workers. Truth is, anyone can develop a training program, you do not have to be a specialist or even have any specific certifications!
To create a training program, I followed the steps below:
Identify a Gap
Figure out what kind of training is needed in your location or organization. This can be input from leaders, individual contributors, and your front-line workers. Be sure to always be listening to see what kind of improvements you can possibly make to your organization.
Create Training Objectives
Before creating a training, you will need to decide what you want your participants to gain from the training. This will help develop the content. For the bias training, I knew I wanted employees to walk away understanding bias, knowing they are not wrong for having biases, and how to minimize their negative biases. From there, I began to build the training.
Know Your Audience
Let’s be honest, no one likes mandatory training. You hear the words “mandatory training” and most likely you tune out and hope the training is virtual so you can work on other things. To keep people engaged, you need interaction! The training I created had multiple points to engage the audience. One activity involved two volunteers and multiple “True or False” statements.
Leverage Existing Material
Do not make things harder than they need to be – use google, materials from your organization, or any other materials that you have access to. Existing material can help you save lots of time and stress.
Find Inspiration in Unlikely Places
When you feel like you have hit a wall and you are defeated, make sure to keep looking. The activity for this training came from a podcast on my morning drive. A guest on the podcast talked about seeing the world through different lenses. I immediately paused the podcast and created a voice memo, then the “Bias Blinders” activity was born. Inspiration may come from podcasts or a stranger walking by in the supermarket.
Gain Support
Get support from leadership and employees to help support your training. Your support system can help give you a different perspective! It takes a team to develop training!
Revise, Revise, Revise
I cannot emphasize this enough, go through multiple revisions. I have many versions of this training program after. Going through multiple feedback sessions. I even modified the training after training my first group of employees and it didn’t go well. Always look for improvements in your work.
Ongoing Education
Giving training only does so much, especially if your audience walks out of the room and has no reason to remember anything you just told them. For this bias training, I developed an 8-week-long partner program to engage all attendees in the content after the training has ended. The program includes incentives to relearn and engage with the material.
Don’t Give Up
Everything you do has value, even if it is just a learning experience! In the best case scenario, the training is amazing, and you get to show off your work. Worst case scenario it is not so great, but you still worked to develop something, and you have experience.
My training program was successful, and it was a huge win for me and the employees! 300 employees received my training in my facility and now it is getting rolled out to other locations. If I can do it, you can do it!
