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How Trainers Should Setup an Ideal Training Course

Written by: Paul Anderson

Article Overview: Business training is becoming increasingly popular these days. If you are a trainer or an HR staff manager, you might need to decide on how to setup the course agenda to get maximum results. Is there any research that can tell you if it is better to start at 9 and finish at 5 or instead use some other interval? What is the ideal time to use breaks? Of course, there are already established formulas and many people are familiar with them. However a research in this area can make it easier to ask people to stay longer, come earlier or have a break at a different time. This article explores various topics in this area and provides a number of guidelines.

How Trainers Should Setup an Ideal Training Course

Business training is becoming increasingly popular these days. If you are a trainer or an HR staff manager, you might need to decide on how to setup the course agenda to get maximum results. Is there any research that can tell you if it is better to start at 9 and finish at 5 or instead use some other interval? What is the ideal time to use breaks?

Of course, there are already established formulas and many people are familiar with them. However a research in this area can make it easier to ask people to stay longer, come earlier or have a break at a different time. This article explores various topics in this area and provides a number of guidelines.

There are a number of factors that influence an ideal day:

• What are you limitations in terms of catering and providing a room, food, etc.?
• How far people have to travel to get to the place?
• Is the course taking place over a single day or multiple days?
• What is the chronotype of delegates?

By knowing these factors, you can heuristically formulate a plan that would satisfy most factors. Some factors may contradict each other, so defining a purely ideal setup might be impossible. You may need to compromise on one or more parameters.

There is research in this area mainly on chronotype and also how people learn progressively over time. The chronotype is effectively a graph that represents how productive you are at different times of the day. For example some people are morning people and some are night people. They simply get more done at specific times.

Unfortunately the general wisdom is that everyone is always more productive in the morning. Research shows that this is not necessarily true. Some people like the warming up process. As a day passes, new associations are formed in the brain based on what you encounter. Accumulation of these associations can make it easier to come across new ideas, become more creative and solve problems. All of this means that some people might be a lot more productive in the afternoon or evening having worked on the topic all day.

To take advantage of this, you can ask your delegates to tell you about their chronotype before attending the course. If you know when they best learn, you can bias the course and its content to maximise learning. Of course, you may need to use a statistical approach as you may not be able to satisfy everyone’s chronotype.

The morning is ideal for learning new content and memorisation. This suggests that if you have a lot of content to go through which people need to be aware of or memorise without doing much analysis on, you can ask them to come early in the morning and use a larger part of the morning to go through the content.

On the other hand, if your course requires solving and is mainly analytical, you may prepare people in the morning by working on similar topics and move on to problem solving later in the day. This suggests that you can start later than normal and finish late as well. People don’t learn well in later part of the day, but they are usually efficient when participating in activities related to content covered earlier in the day. Again, as a trainer you can exploit this as well.

Take breaks when:

• People are getting restless and physically tired.
• People are concerned about errands that they need to take care of. Lunch time is required partly for this.
• A major topic has finished. Before moving on to the next topic, you can have a quick break which energises people and get them mentally and physically ready for the next part.

In practice, when considering the factors and limitations, there isn’t a huge variation in your options as most people are used to set formats mainly dictated by 9 to 5 working mentality. In any case, it is good to know the factors that can influence you and what you can do to take advantage of them.

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Article Tags: business training, course, soft skills, trainer, training, training materials



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