These Are the Mistakes You Must Avoid in Employee Training

Your company’s success is directly dependent on how competent your employees are at doing their job. Employees with previous experience in the same field they will be working in at your company will generally have no problem keeping up with their workload. Still, you won’t always get lucky with this type of employee. You’ll often get a qualified worker with no previous experience with the type of work they will be performing, so they’ll probably need someone to show them the ropes, as they say.

Because of this, it’s often necessary to have a training program for new employees that will adequately educate them and give them all the necessary abilities for the work they will be doing in the company. Creating a solid training program and adequately putting it into practice is no easy feat, so educators often tend to make mistakes. Fortunately, these mistakes can be anticipated – you are far from the first person to have made them – and rectified before they cause any problems for the employees taking the training. In this post, we want to talk about some of the most common mistakes educators make when putting a training program into practice, so without further ado, here they are.

Too Much Information

One of the most common mistakes educators make when initiating the training program is that they overwhelm the trainees with a bunch of info. And no matter how well you categorize it, you’ve got to realize that the human brain is not that good at remembering different types of information during a short period. It’s a bit like when you listen to someone explain the rules to a board game you’ve never played before – you absorb some of the info, the gist of it if you will, but you won’t get it all down until you sit down and play the game. And you’ll undoubtedly need to be reminded of the details more than once.

So, rather than bombard your students with all kinds of information and hope they’ll soak in the most important stuff, give them only the most basic stuff and then build from there.

Failing to Motivate

Whenever we try to learn something new, our minds will immediately ask: “How can I use this information? Is this something that I will need in my work?”

And as an educator, you need to be aware of this fact and adapt your material so that your students always know why they’re learning whatever they’re learning. Many examples are always good because they make the material of the employee training program tangible for the trainees and enable them to see the value of what they are trying to learn.

Lack of Communication

It’s important to realize that we as people are all different in terms of how quickly and efficiently we can learn a new skill. Some will pick it up pretty quickly, others might need more time, and what might seem like child’s play to one person can prove significantly more challenging to another and vice versa. Because of this, it’s essential to keep in contact with your students, know how well they’re mastering the material, and clear up any uncertainties they might have over any subject.

Also, encourage your students to ask as many questions as they find necessary. Asking questions about one’s uncertainties not only clears up the uncertainty but is also a much more active and involved learning process than simply listening to a lecture. By involving oneself in a conversation with the lecturer, one’s attention span is significantly more powerful. So it’s far more likely that the student will remember whatever the question was about in the long term.

Large Groups

The larger the group of trainees is, the harder it is to keep a sustainable level of communication between the students and the teacher. Therefore, it is good practice to keep this number to about a dozen or even fewer. The fewer people there are, the more effective the training will be unless you use a software-aided training program that can keep up with any number of trainees.

Using our knowledge testing software GetCertified, for example, it is possible to teach a large group of people simultaneously, but only because a powerful computer program aids you. If you want to keep the lesson as organic as possible, however, the number of participants is something that you should keep under control.

Generic Training

Humans like diversity – we always have, and the less diverse a subject or lecture is, the more effort we need to put in to keep our focus and attention. This is why generic lectures continuously initiated and conducted in the same way will undoubtedly fail at educating your employees properly. Make sure your classroom atmosphere is as dynamic as the training will allow. You’ll find that keeping the trainee’s attention is much easier and ultimately allow them to produce better results at the end of the training.

Summary

That covers all the most critical mistakes you should always look out for when conducting employee training. To sum up, you need to make sure not to overload your students with a lot of information and make sure that your lessons are meaningful and motivating to your students. It’s also important to limit the number of trainees taking the training simultaneously and encourage the students to initiate communication with the teacher through questions. And lastly, make sure that your lectures are exciting and diverse, as that is way more likely to keep a trainee’s attention and thus help them master the material better. Good luck!