Training: what is it and how to conduct it

Training is an intensive form of training, where useful practical skills are transferred from the speaker to the audience in a short time. In this article, we will talk about regular trainings, which involve direct contact of the speaker with different user groups. If you are interested in the online format, read the article about organizing a webinar. In online training, everything is arranged in much the same way, and the main difference is related to the large amount of material offered.

Training can last from one to several days, and this format can be called an extended version of the master class: the speaker has more opportunities to reveal the essence of the proposed topic, and users have more time to interact, share experiences, study and consolidate immediately several skills.

Next, we will talk about how to organize your first training. We will write a guide that may be useful in preparing for the performance. It will not include organizational issues related to the sale of tickets, interaction with the conference organizers and other minor things – you are adults and will be able to independently agree on everything. We will devote the saved time to nuances that are not visible at first sight.

Consider opting out

First of all, you should have enough qualifications to conduct trainings – this is a long event, during which you will be forced to tell a lot of nuances on the chosen topic. If you organize an event only for profit, you will quickly earn a bad reputation and will not be able to develop in this direction – no one will go to your performances. Therefore, refrain from training unless you have in-depth knowledge and can not give more value than the entrance ticket costs.

A humorous video about the truth at fake trainings.

Secondly, you must be prepared to work with an adult audience. There are many specific points here, the main ones look like this:

• Adults have accumulated experience that has proven useful in various life situations. At the training, this experience will compete with new knowledge, and because of this, many participants will have low motivation to learn and acquire additional skills. Often such people attend dozens of events, know all the necessary theory, do nothing for the result and always demand increased attention from you. As a result, you will waste your time and energy, and no one will take advantage of your advice.
• Adults question the authority of any speaker. Beginning coaches without enough formal regalia are subjected to increased criticism. Only a deep knowledge of the material that we talked about in the first paragraph of this section will help to cope with distrust.
• Adults have developed skeptical thinking, so all training tasks should be useful in practice. Just like that, no one wants to do anything for the general development. Therefore, each step will require a detailed explanation: “Now we are doing exercise number 1, which will help achieve this. If you do not master it, you will not be able to perform these tasks, ”etc.
• Adults value their time dearly, so they will not tolerate hitches and banal knowledge that they can get without attending a training.

If you have tested yourself and feel doubts about the first or second point, consider not doing the training. Most likely, you do not have enough resources to organize everything qualitatively. Give yourself some more time to prepare. If nothing bothers you, go to the next paragraph of the instruction.

Determine the direction of the training

To begin with, make a collective image of the person the training is aimed at. You don’t have to try to please everyone. Target a specific audience. For example, you want to conduct self-defense training for office workers who have not served in the military and know nothing about street fights.

Now formulate a real problem that all participants in the training should deal with. Here is an example of a bad task: after three days of training, you will learn to knock out any person with one blow – here there is emptiness behind a big promise, because without many years of preparation it is impossible to complete the task.

Here is an example of a good task: after three days of classes, you will learn to see the danger in advance, learn to be careful, learn about the allowed means of self-defense, learn the basics of conflictology and be able to prevent 95% of aggression – all these are real goals that are mastered from scratch.

Come up with a concept – this is the interesting part that will distinguish your training from dozens of others. For example, your concept could be self-defense lessons in the field – you specifically refuse a warm gym and take participants to those places where the risk of attack is highest. There can be many concepts and you need to think about what your participants will remember more. If you have trouble preparing a concept, read the tips from the book Steal Like an Artist, study the materials of colleagues, highlight interesting ideas and adapt them to your own training. Everyone does it, and don’t be shy.

Write a training program

A syllabus is all of the material that you plan to use throughout the training. Here are some tips to help with this:

• Forget timing. Timing is the division of training by hours. For example, from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. you get to know each other and decide all organizational issues, from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. do the first exercise, then a 30-minute coffee break, and so on. Here, at any moment, everything can go wrong, and due to the broken chronology, classes will be boring and ineffective.
• Use semantic blocks instead of timing. A semantic block is a fixed amount of material that can be easily built into lunch or coffee breaks. The semantic block is not tied in time, and any moment can be replaced by another. For example, you started to perform an exercise that none of the participants is interested in. Since your material is cut into blocks, it is easy for you to remove this uninterestingness and offer something new. If there was a clear timing, then everyone would suffer.
• Write down a few alternative scenarios in case something goes wrong and the participants don’t like the prepared material.
• Add some blocks to the “basement” – collect additional material that was not originally included in the training program. This material can be useful when working with an active and well-prepared audience that has easily mastered the skills offered. In this case, you should not dwell on the past, but switch to the development of a new skill. All training time should be beneficial.

Let’s take our three-day self-defense training for office workers, use the recommendations listed and make a sample program:

The more interactive and non-standard situations you can offer, the higher the value of your program. It will be cool if a non-obvious variable is entered into the interactive. For example, you will hire special people who, under the guise of gopniks, will try to attack several participants in the training. Stress will be added here, and students will be able to better remember all the theoretical concepts.

Correct the prepared training program

When you complete all the blocks, you will face many restrictions. For example, even in a rented cafe, you may be prohibited from demonstrating self-defense techniques, or you will not be able to find well-trained people who can make high-quality training and attack training participants without harm to health. In this case, the program will have to be rewritten and adapted to the resources that are available. Here it is important to connect creative thinking, so as not to turn an interesting idea into an insipid lesson.

Conduct a training and think about the future

If your training meets the expectations of the audience, get ready for the fact that you will not have time to present most of the material. There will certainly be additional questions or nuances that will delay the training and limit the program. In this case, you must rank all the semantic blocks according to the level of importance: from priority to secondary.

Put priority blocks at the beginning and work with them until all the necessary information has been told. If there is time left, you can connect secondary blocks. At the end, be sure to give links to your resources where you can find out more information, buy a paid product, or sign up for the next training. That’s all.

We understand that it is impossible to take into account all the nuances within the framework of one article. Therefore, we tried to talk about the most important thing, and now we are waiting for feedback. Write how your first training went and which of the suggested recommendations helped you? Good luck!