KEY PRESENTATION SKILLS TRAINING
Choosing the Right Training Provider for You

Choosing the Best Training Provider

With so many excellent training companies around, how do we choose the right one for us?

It usually boils down to preference for style and comfort with those delivering the training.

We want our choice to dovetail with how we work, personally and across our business unit, and how we learn.

The problem is that everyone works in different ways, each with his or her preferred style of learning.

Some of us prefer the use of pictures, images and diagrams to embed what we hear.  Others prefer words and aural input. Others prefer tactile and expressive methods to consolidate their learning experience. Still others prefer colour-coding to link-in the different aspects of their knowledge and aid their understanding.

So, in reality, whoever we choose will be a compromise, unless it's personal one-to-one training for us alone!

Although we have a preferred style, that doesn't mean that's our only way of learning. We can learn in other ways. 

The use of colours may not be high on our list of preferences, but it has been shown that the use of colours to 'code' and link different things together works well with a large number of people (unless they are profoundly colour-blind or visually impaired).

How DO we cater for individuals who lack one of the major senses such as sight? More than 90% of their input (visual) is missing and therefore, we must consider aural methods (and the impact of background noise on potentially 'making them deaf too'). There are specialist trainers for these situations but there may be people within our companies or organisations that we unwittingly exclude or make feel the odd-one-out simply because we do not consider such issues (and that can include our training courses or programmes).

So, in any group we will have a range of different preferences for learning. Therefore, we want a trainer who is flexible enough to employ a range of different styles in their delivery so that he or she will engage more of their audience. Trainers who can respond to the specific needs of their audience on the day of training will be even more successful in their outcome.

But what is a successful outcome?  It is when materials, methods, practical advice and each individual's skills and qualities dovetail so that we (their audience) are engaged and enabled to take on-board, process, understand and apply what we receive.

A trainer is not training the whole group: they are training each individual within that group and therefore, it is essential that each member can engage with the training they are receiving.

Creative approaches are great, and they should be encouraged but they don't work with every audience! It's often the more outgoing personalities or those who are used to working in an environment where they are encouraged to step-out, try new things, challenge others (regardless of their 'status within the company), come from a creative background or are younger who respond well to this type of training. If we don't we can feel alienated or out-of-place and fail to engage with what's being said or done.

Some of us had any notion of creativity educated-out of us at school. We learnt that getting the right answer was more important than understanding the process of how we arrived at it. Getting ticks on the page was far more important crosses (yet how many of us learnt from getting something right?). Some of us are simply more comfortable with more traditional styles of learning and there's nothing wrong with that.

It's too easy for trainers to become so focussed on their methods of delivery that they lose sight of what their audience has to offer and what their audience needs.

The most powerful training is when we can take the 'WHAT' (methods, observations, materials etc), combine them with the 'WHO' (the 'us' bit in the equation: our skills, qualities, experience etc) and start to feel confident about what we're doing.

Whoever we choose and whatever style they use, it is essential that when we walk out to face an audience we feel empowered and confident in ourselves, our methods and our materials so that we can engage our audience and deliver our message in a clear, memorable and interesting way. And if we remember that our audience may just contain a number of individuals with compromised senses we will be able to go that extra mile to include EVERYONE we speak to.

MORE INFORMATION

Key Presentation Skills is administered by Waywood Training.

Dr Stuart Wood
c/o Waywood Training
PO Box 202
Loughborough
Leics
LE11 1WH

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Key Presentation Skills is administered by Waywood Training
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