At Orgwide, our goal is to always create training modules that learners find relatable and valuable. As a team, we are constantly improving our modules to better connect with and engage learners. We have found three fundamental elements that help learners connect and engage with training in any industry or role.
Keep it SMART
Just like creating professional and personal development goals, our learning objectives for training need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. By making our learning objectives SMART, this helps keep our training focused on the relevant need-to-know information, as well as keeping our modules shorter and more engaging. Let’s take a look at how we can write SMARTER learning objectives.
Make Training Actionable
“How am I ever going to use this?” is a common question I hear when helping my daughters with their homework. For our adult learners, we can’t leave this question open. The faster learners can put information into action, the more engaged they will be. Training modules should clearly state how the information will be applied and used. We need to give our learners specific ways they can practice what they are learning. Review our blog from last week about how on-the-job training aids can be incorporated into online learning modules to extend training.
Use Their Lingo
We should always strive to eliminate as many barriers as possible in training. Some limitations like time and tools might be hard to overcome, but one thing we can do is ensure our training sounds like our team. If we are creating a course for our operations team, we should leverage the acronyms and terminology their team uses day in and day out. If we were instead building a module for our sales team, that module should leverage the sales team’s language rather than the operations team.
As training and development professionals, our goal is simple: to ensure that all our team members have the skills and knowledge to do their job effectively. To meet this goal, we must ensure that our learners can connect, understand, and leverage the training modules that they complete by keeping it SMART, making it actionable, and using their lingo.
Kate Berg Vice President, Operations and Customer Support