How To Build A Great Instructor-Led Custom Training On A Tight Budget

During the past 30 years, a lot of corporate training has garnered a bad reputation. I've heard some say the culprit is over-reliance on PowerPoint or Keynote. Others in our field bemoan expediency brought on by tighter budgets, or instructional designers whose sole qualifications are on-the-job experience. The truth is that training mode, training budget and trainer competency are really not the largest contributors to this problem. Instead, the real issue is a widely-held misunderstanding by the misinformed majority that presenting information in a pseudo-teaching environment is training. But presenting information is not the same as training. It's just information, presented in an attractive wrapper.

Instead, good training aligns employees with organizational goals and delivers results. Employees are able to do something new that they have not been able to do before. THAT’S when you know you have good training. And it doesn't always have to cost that much more to be effective. Here's how to easily build a great instructor-led corporate training on a tight budget.

Best Learning Practices For Best Business Results

Training professionals understand that there are proven theories, models and strategies that incorporate:

how people learn
why they change, and
what training must do to achieve learning and change.

Great training transforms an employee’s behavior. It builds staff’s capacity to perform new skills, shepherding them to a different mindset and improving everyone’s attitude to benefit the organization as a whole. Doing this successfully requires a thorough understanding of learning psychology, some of which comes quite naturally for empathetic instructors. Learners in the right, capable hands of a qualified instructor are able to walk away from a custom corporate training able to perform new skills in the real world, because of their first-hand experience within an environment that addresses conflict, personal challenges, and other obstacles they may have to learning.

However, the process can initially be very complex. That is one reason you often see the most effective instructor-led initiatives leveraging trainers who earned a Master’s degree from a reputable instructional design academic program. They apply the systematic design process learned in their graduate program to real-world applications, helping leverage seemingly esoteric theory into very practical and concrete business results. It is costly to build this expertise through trial and error, because a company losing money on failure will close its doors before long.

Reduce Custom Training Expense By Using The Right Mode For Training

There are many types of training delivery methods, including hybrid approaches. Some of these include:

instructor-led (face-to-face),
virtual instructor-led (via Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or another online teleconferencing service),
eLearning (automated on an LMS to run at any time day or night),
micro-learning modules delivered via to smart phones,
immersive games and simulations for learning, and
even training in 3D environments.

Each of these tactics has pros and cons, including a wide range of investment involved. Some companies look to save costs by reducing their training department headcount, then launch an online learning academy whose team lacks the ability to effectively transform face-to-face instruction into an elearning regime. Other companies go for flashy and highly decorative new training curricula whose production costs do not translate into proportionate learning results. The current love of using avatars in training is just one example of flash that entertains but does little if anything to motivate or facilitate actual learning. Therefore, no matter what combination of approaches you employ, be sure to you or your trainers have internalized systematic design instruction in the build process so that your company realizes quantified performance improvements.

8 Ways To Build A Great Instructor-Led Corporate Training

There are 7-8 things you should do to help ensure your customized training is cohesive and effective. Tasks 1 and 2 should be done simultaneously, and the rest should each be done in linear order, with none of them skipped:

1. Define the terminal objective

Determine what you want to see the learner do as the result of the training. Is it, for example, to effectively handle an irate customer? Could it be to write an effective manufacturing work instruction? Perhaps it is a set of instructor-led trainings on how to perform several different ethical behaviors in alignment with your mission and vision. This end result is called a ‘terminal objective’.

2. Define the target learning audience

Consider the ‘target audience’ – who must be able to perform the desired result of the training. Who are these people? What is their educational background, their training, their motivation to change, and their related attitude towards changing? What portion of your learner population has accessibility considerations? Get as specific as you can in terms of what these individuals bring to the table and who they are as people.

3. Create the learning objectives

Determine the steps that must be taken to achieve the end result and turn these into learning objectives. These are called ‘enabling objectives’.

4. Chart the steps to each objective

Create a list of steps that one must take to achieve each enabling objective. Sometimes you have to break down each step even more, so that you have to train each sub-step. At this point, you might want to create a case study that can demonstrate each step in the process. This can we used as the foundation for authentic activities.

5. Build activities that practice each step

Discuss how to accomplish each step, and then build an activity for the learner to practice that step. It helps to show pictures with call-out boxes or videos of the desired behavior to clearly connect them to the aspects of the step.

6. Add consolidation activities

At certain places in the training provide a consolidation activity, where the learner is asked to perform the entire set of steps and sub-steps up to that point. Make sure to provide them with constructive feedback on how they could improve, and consider how you will rate performance. Critical, constructive feedback is essential if you want them to grow in their capabilities.

7. Bring It All Together

At the end of the training, provide an activity where the learner engages in the entire behavior with – preferably – a new case study. Provide feedback to them on how well they did and what they could do to improve.

8. (Optional) Test Them Out

Although the activity above does much of this, you can also build a post-test set of questions that enable the learner to demonstrate what they know how to do in a more traditional way. This can be useful for easy quantification of performance. Having the same pre-test as the post-test can also help you quantify learning gains.

Written by Sue Ebbers, Ph.D. and published in 2023.

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Use This Custom Training Worksheet

It definitely helps to have an organizing document or tool that chronicles the answers to each decision. That way they all stay in the forefront of your mind while customizing courses.

This free worksheet from Change by Design is optimized to help in that regard.