Friday, January 20, 2012

Training Support Services for Optimal Course Design

In corporate training every learning programme has varying goals, objectives, strategies, budgets and audiences and therefore training preparation and delivery is critical. Conducting a Training Needs Analysis (TNA) is vital to developing, designing and delivering a course to meet your specific needs. While instructional design and learning theory is important for training course development, experience usually adds a key factor to develop best practice. A specialised blend of training expertise and learning technology is required to provide the most cost effective support service.

The good news is that you are not alone and expert Training Support Services can be engaged to assist you in developing a training solution that will be most appropriate for your environment. Using these services can prevent you from designing courses that are seemingly wonderful but nobody takes them or has fascinating content that teaches your audience nothing new or relevant. The underlying business goal in all training courses is to increase revenue and /or reduce costs. The greater the expected revenue the more budget can be set aside to fund the learning programme development.

Well-developed training programmes can assist organisations with productivity, job satisfaction, retention rates, error rates and customer satisfaction. Measuring the impact and effectiveness of a training programme is critical and metrics should be decided on when a course is designed so that they can be gauged before, after and for an extended period after the training has taken place. Participant feedback is also an integral part of the process as 'softer' elements such as cultural dynamics, values and best-fit for an organisation can be elicited from their responses.

When designing training programmes for adult learners an important point to consider during planning is that they come with a wide range of experiences, knowledge, interests, skills and competencies and this diversity must be accommodated. Adults prefer courses with 'real-world' applications where the training relates to their daily activities and teaches them relevant skills to develop in their environments. Knowledge transfer must be facilitated in the training process and learner interaction and coaching as well as other follow-up support processes is important for sustained learning.

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