The main objective of corporate training is to teach employees how to do their jobs better. However, many corporate training programs have a slow, generic feel that has no connection to the actual work that employees do. Employees will click through presentation slides, answer obvious quiz questions, and return to work, not changing the way they behave.
This type of training wastes time and money. This also causes employees to begin treating learning as a box to check off. Once this box-checking habit is established, they will resist taking courses that could be helpful to them.
Fortunately, the majority of causes for boring training can be corrected by making a few simple design choices. You do not need a larger platform, a longer training course, or more presentation slides. You need clear goals, a well-organized design, and content that respects the learner's use of their time.
Below you will find ten training-design mistakes that make corporate training boring, as well as some specific recommendations on how to avoid making these mistakes.
1. Starting With Content Instead of a Business Goal
When developing their training programs, many companies use a structured approach. They will begin with a topic (security awareness, onboarding new employees, selling skills, laws/regulations, or product knowledge) and then find materials related to that topic to create the course.
Using this method can provide overblown training. This means that the course will try to provide everything the company knows about that subject area in one course, and therefore, employees will have to spend time reviewing the information they may never use.
Rather than starting with the topic, start with the desired outcomes of the training. Ask yourself, "What changes do we want to see in employee performance after they have completed this training?"
Here is an example: A new hire in sales should feel comfortable handling price objections, an agent in customer support should reduce the number of times a customer has to create a support request for the same issue, and a manager must provide employees with actionable feedback to support their development and improvement.
Having a clear target will assist in determining which content is weak and should be removed from the training program. If content or activities (like slides) do not help learners perform the tasks needed to reach their target, they should be removed.
General advice would be to use this statement to frame your thoughts for the course. "After completing this training, the employee will have the ability to ...." After determining your completion statement, you should develop your lessons, activities, and quizzes around the statement.
2. Making Training Too Long
Long courses drain attention. Employees open the course between meetings, customer calls, deadlines, and messages. A 90-minute module asks for focus that most workdays cannot support. Break long training into smaller parts. A course on customer communication can become four short lessons:
● Greeting the customer
● Asking better questions
● Handling anger
● Closing with clear next steps
Each lesson should teach one skill and give one practice task. Short lessons help employees return to the course without losing context.
3. Using Slides as the Main Learning Experience
Use PowerPoint for your training, but don't rely only on slides to deliver the entire experience of training employees.
Many training courses created by businesses are made entirely from PowerPoint slides (with voice narration). Learners primarily engage with bullet point text appearing on the screen, followed by answering a quiz where the quiz question repeats the words found on the previous slide. This does not require learners to apply or utilize the information as they view it.
In addition to keeping the learner engaged, replace passive slides with opportunities for lateral thinking and application-based decision-making. For example, instead of a passive situation where an employee receives a suspicious document from a vendor while taking a data protection course, the employee has the opportunity to select an alternative action and view its outcome, thus seeing how that action applies to the data principle in question.
4. Ignoring the Learner’s Daily Work
Because employees might not see how the training relates to them, training can feel monotonous. Generic examples can make the course feel like it was created for someone else (e.g., financial compliance for salespeople).
For example, a finance person and a salesperson both have to comply with financial regulations, but are more likely to relate to different compliance examples/questions than a manufacturing person, who will also comply with some facet of the same legislation, most likely in a different manner than the other.
For another example, a new supervisor has different feedback practices than an executive. A support representative would benefit from using real support tickets vs. imaginary customer service scenarios.
Utilize the language, tools, and situations that are familiar to the people whom you are training. Ask the supervisors of your teams about what their groups do wrong. Look at internal chat logs, support tickets, sales calls, and quality reports to find examples of where your employees have difficulties.
5. Teaching Rules Without Practice
Employees don’t remember rules they have only read. However, employees will remember the rules they use.
Typically, a policy training program will explain the actions to be taken, and tests will include simple recall-type questions. While this may be appropriate for increasing awareness of a policy, it has little if any effect on influencing behavioral change.
Practice needs to be as close to actual practice as possible. Therefore, if the employee needs to compose a safer email message, they should be asked to rewrite a risky email message. Likewise, if managers need to run improved one-on-one meetings with their employees, they should be provided with a condensed employee scenario, then asked to choose one of several proposed employee responses.
For example, if a sales representative needs to qualify a lead, they can be provided an example of call notes and asked to determine what the next question should be.
6. Overloading Employees With Information
Too often, subject matter experts wish to encompass too much. There is a wealth of knowledge: they know:
● All the exceptions
● All the edge cases
● How long something has been done, etc.
To the subject matter expert, all of this is useful information; however, for learners, very often, it's an overload.
The training should separate out what someone "has to know more about at this point in time," as opposed to knowing that "will be useful down the road." Formalized best practices should be included in the lesson; any reference information should be documented in a job aid (for example, a checklist, an FAQ, a page on the help center).
For example, the purpose of a new employee onboarding course is to provide sufficient training for completing their first week's tasks. The purpose of an onboarding course is NOT to provide the new employee with training on every possible process within the organization.
7. Using Weak Quizzes
Learners can feel accomplished when repeating definitions via a quiz. However, for example, employees will very likely pass the quiz and not be able to perform their job successfully.
Therefore, effective quizzes should focus on testing the choices your learners would make as they face a realistic situational problem and choose their next action step. Provide feedback as well as the answer and explain the rationale for the answer.
For example, rather than using this question:
“There may be suspicious links in phishing emails – true or false?”
Use this question instead:
“You receive an email from a vendor indicating they are contacting you to use a new link to log into your account. The sender’s email address has an extra letter in it. What action should you take?”
This question will evaluate the application of judgment rather than memory.
8. Treating Training as a One-Time Event
Changing behaviour through a single course is difficult for employees because they need reminders and practice with feedback once the lesson is finished.
For instance, a manager goes to training and learns new techniques for giving feedback better, then two weeks later they have a difficult conversation to have (and because the manager does not have any checklists, sample phrases, or someone to coach them in this conversation) they will likely revert to their old habits.
Support should be planned after the course. Send short reminders. Provide managers with prompting discussion questions. Include checklists in the tools that employees already use. Have team leaders review one technique at team meetings each week.
9. Forgetting the Role of Design
Poorly designed content will cause the learner to have difficulty reading it. When slides are crowded, with small type, multiple fonts, and a haphazard application of colour, the learner will tire faster. Instead of learning the ability being taught, they will be using their resources trying to decode what's being presented on the screen.
A proper design will allow learners to stay focused. Use smaller paragraphs, add spacing between sections, and only use screenshots where necessary to complete the required task. The layout of buttons and navigation should always be easily identifiable.
Design also encompasses the overall flow of the course. Learners need to know their current location within the course, what to expect next, and how many remaining tasks need completion.
10. Measuring Completion Instead of Impact
Completion rates show you who completed the training program. They do not indicate whether employees implemented what they learned while doing their job.
You need to measure the improvement of the behavior that the training program was supposed to improve. For example:
● For sales training, look at the quality of their calls or the sales team's conversion rates.
● For support training, look at the percentage of repeat tickets created by the customers and the customer satisfaction score.
● For compliance training, look at the number of risk reports submitted and the number of manager observations submitted.
Use the data with caution. While a training program can help an employee improve, so do working conditions, tools, personnel, and incentives. Compare multiple data points before judging the effectiveness of any training program.
How to Make Corporate Training More Engaging
Strong corporate training gives employees something to do. It asks them to solve problems, make choices, and apply ideas to their own work.
Start with a workplace problem instead of a definition
For example, do not open a cybersecurity lesson with a list of policy terms. Show an email that looks suspicious and ask the learner what they would do. Then explain the rule after the learner has faced the decision.
Use short scenarios based on real work
A sales rep can handle a pricing objection. A support agent can answer an angry customer. A manager can respond to an employee who missed a deadline. These moments help learners connect the course to their daily tasks.
Give employees tools they can use after the lesson
A checklist, script, template, or decision tree often has more value than another slide. For example, a manager training course can include a feedback planning template. A compliance course can include a “before you share this file” checklist.
Conclusion
Corporate training becomes unexciting when teams develop it around data rather than tasks. Employees want training that values their time, addresses well-known issues, and provides opportunities to perform real-world tasks.
Begin with an overall business goal to define what is taught to achieve this goal. Keep lessons brief, so employees do not get bored, and provide them with numerous scenarios, practice, and work-based assessments. Continue to assist employees after they have completed the program; measure the difference in their work.
Kwiga provides the training teams with the resources to provide employees with clarity in the learning experience. It has everything from online training courses (some even include assessments) to automated processes and tracking of learners. While Kwiga cannot fix poor content, it does allow you to deliver excellent training content in an instructional manner so that employees can utilize the material.