1. You’re not setting clear objectives

The clearer and SMARTer you can get with your training goals the better. The last thing you want as a trainer is to go through the work of developing, planning, and delivering a training workshop, only to realize you missed the mark with what you actually wanted your trainees to get out of it. The key to having an impact on your trainees after the workshop is the work you do before it to prepare. This research phase involves taking the time to really understand the challenges, threats, and opportunities that may have brought up some skills gaps. It means examining the highly specific goals of your trainees or their organization. Sometimes you may be able to determine these independently, but be sure to also consider getting feedback from your clients to ensure that you are on the right track.

2. You’re not considering your audience

If you don’t know the audience that you are training for, there’s no better time than the present to work towards researching them so you can gain a better understanding of catering your services to them. This is not only in what training topic you want to offer but how you want to deliver it. Does it need to be an in-person training session? Or would your trainees appreciate the convenience of an online training program?

If you have been delivering training for a while now, you might want to take some time to reflect on the type of training your clients have been looking for, and what has been the most successful. One exercise to help with this is to develop customer profiles. This involves creating “personas” for your most common customers. You can get as specific as you want, even name them if you want! The purpose is to help you see your target market clearer so you can better understand their needs.

Things to include in customer profiles include:

• Who they are
• Why they may buy into your training
• What their values/goals are
• What type of training they are interested in (format, topic, etc.)

Putting in the work to understand your customers will ensure you are providing services they actually want and will keep them coming back and referring you to others.

3. You’re spending too much time creating content from scratch

Outsourcing where possible is an excellent opportunity to save time for your organization. You may be surprised by how many parts of your business you can delegate to a third party to fast-track various types of projects.

Writing training content from scratch takes countless hours of time, but with our materials, it reduces your prep time significantly.

With our Workshop Training Library, we have you covered with professional, quality training materials on soft skills and Microsoft Office. This saves hours of time researching and writing content. Upon payment, you get immediate access to our full Workshop Training Library of over 170 courses. This is where you can step in and customize the materials to best suit your organization’s needs. Edit content to better reflect your brand and even mix and match courses. You can also use examples related to your industry to help your trainees better their understanding in a contextual way. All of our training materials can be customized using any word processor.

4. You’re not tracking your results

Training is a significant investment for your clients. Because of this, it is important to analyze the payback from it. In some cases, this may be easy – you may be able to see a drop in hard numbers (like product defects, customer complaints, or days absent) as a result of your training. In other cases, the benefit might involve something much harder to calculate, like reduced stress, improved teamwork, or better communication.

There are various different ways to measure the effectiveness of your training. These include:

• Quizzes and tests – Testing helps identify gaps in knowledge which allows you to clarify what needs to be reviewed and covered in more detail for future workshops.
• Self-analysis or supervisor analysis – Evaluation from different perspectives can show you the multifaceted impact training can have from an internal and external perspective.
• Metrics tracking – Numbers are a clear-cut way to find a correlation between your training and how it is contributing to your bottom line.
• Workplace observation – A more qualitative way to measure training results, observing shifts in the workplace post-training in regards to productivity and workplace morale is highly valuable to track.

Learn more about how to measure results from your training workshops in one of our recent blog posts.

5. You’re not collecting feedback

Feedback is one of the key parts of continued and built upon success as a trainer. It provides highly valuable information to you from your clients, the most direct source. It allows you to learn what went right and how you can improve training sessions in the future. It could also inspire creativity by getting new ideas and valuable perspectives.

Trainee feedback surveys will help you get a better understanding of your trainee’s values and give you data to make better decisions for the future of your training business.

There are three main factors your feedback questions should cover; reactions, learning, and behavior. This allows you to get their first impression of their services, understand what they got out of it, and how they have been impacted by it.

Check out our trainee feedback survey template from one of our recent blog posts.

Conclusion

If you are already implementing our advice in this article, congrats! But we hope this blog post gave you some inspiration to dig deeper and improve your training sessions even more.