From onboarding to professional development, training materials play an essential role in human resource strategy. Well-designed training content can effectively communicate expectations, establish roles and responsibilities and define processes and procedures.
Whether your business is two employees or thousands, training materials are an invaluable resource. Organizations need training content of all kinds: training materials for leadership development, customer service training materials to teach phone skills, even training materials for trainers.
Let’s look at how we can create more easy, understandable and engaging training materials. We can customize our own training documents by using easy-to-edit training techniques.
There is a popular theory of consumer action called Jobs to be Done (JTBD). The theory is that we buy things to improve ourselves, to make progress. Products enable us to get a Job Done. It’s a process. It’s not an activity or task, or something we have; it’s something we participate in.
The same holds true for corporate training solutions: we build or buy them to help people make progress or improve in their careers.
Let’s quickly recap. Corporate training solutions:
- Involve a lot of effort and demand that we measure (2-7 times!) before we start our content development process.
- Satisfy a need or desire in people to make progress, to improve.
- Through this lens, we conduct our needs analysis, which should include the following steps:
- Identify the business goal for the training solution.
- Interview a wide range of people and look for expectation gaps.
- Employ a learner-centered corporate training technique.
Identify the business goal for the training solution
The budget for our training comes from the business. Ultimately the goal of our training needs to tie into a business goal too. Identifying the business goal now will be helpful when measuring our ROI (Return on investment).
Interview a wide range of people and look for expectation gaps
There are two key components to this. The first is to include a wide range of people in our sample. Include the key stakeholders with the business need for the training, but also include the learners themselves and their managers.
The second is to use a Socratic questioning technique to enter into thoughtful dialogue with the person we’re interviewing. Our goal should be to allow our interviewee to examine their ideas logically and determine the validity of their viewpoints.
Plan questions in advance, and ensure to include a good mix of the different types of Socratic questions:
- Clarification questions – e.g., Could you give an example of…?
- Assumption questions – e.g., Why are we assuming here?
- Reason and evidence questions – e.g., What led you to believe that?
- Origin or source questions – e.g., What caused you to feel this way?
- Implication and consequence questions – e.g., What effect could that have?
- Viewpoint questions – e.g., How would you answer this objection to that point?
Employ a learner-centered corporate training technique
Never forget we’re dealing with adults. Frame everything we do around the motivational needs of adult learners. Frame everything we do around the motivational needs of adult learners.
Once we’ve identified our business goal, got the answers to our questions, and framed our approach from the perspective of the learner, it’s time to look at what already exists as we build out our corporate training solution.
If good training content exists, we’d be wasting our time if we didn’t use it. At the same time, we want to be sure to assess the quality of existing training content to look for ways to improve it.
About ZRG
Founded in 1994, ZRG International is an ICT solutions company with a major focus on customer interaction technologies and solutions. We offer experience and innovation to help businesses manage customer relationship and achieve higher customer satisfaction and increased profitability.
ZRG has a proven track record of introducing innovations and exciting new possibilities in the customer communication areas. Our line of solutions cover all aspects of customer communication including customer contact center, CRM application suite, quality assurance suite, call center management tools, self-service automation tools, campaign management and teleconferencing. Our solutions are deployed at mission critical contact centers that are being used to provide information, assistance and services to millions of users each day through live agent and self-service based applications.
ZRG has an experienced and knowledgeable team capable of quickly designing and adding tailor-made features in our solutions for site-specific requirements. By using open standards systems, specifications and protocols, we ensure maximum flexibility and future growth of our solutions. We use innovative techniques to deliver latest features and integration capabilities in a most cost-effective manner. Our deployment team has successfully completed all our projects well before the deadlines.
Every day, on every project, we deliver value through our accumulated technical knowledge and project management skills. Our expertise delivers immediate benefits to our clients with cost and time savings. Our solution delivers increased operational efficiency and staff productivity to our valued clients. This is what we do. We deliver beyond expectations.
For more details:- www.zrg.com