What happens after training is what really matters. How can you ensure that your training is successful after it ends?
A participant walks up to you after your training session, smiles, and says:
“Thank you. That was by far the best training session I’ve ever been to. I have to tell you, I’ve been to a lot of these sessions and I didn’t have high hopes for this session, but my boss told me I had to be here. I wasn’t looking forward to it. But now I’m so glad I came.”
As long as you’ve made your content relevant for your audience and have designed opportunities for engagement, a comment like this may not be uncommon.
But what happens after training ends?
After Training Actions for Remote Teams
I completed a project with a Fortune 500 who needed to deliver the same online training program to two different audiences. The first audience was located in their US-based headquarters, the second audience was located in regional offices around the world.
The headquarters has a thriving community of practice for training alumni that meets regularly, in-person. Furthermore, the headquarters has a critical mass of people in this role who can see each other in the break room, daily meetings, the hallway or walking by one another’s desks for informal conversations about challenges and key learnings.
People in regional offices are a little more isolated when it comes to ongoing opportunities for informal learning that can reinforce the initial training. So what are regional and remote staff to do?
Online Communities of Practice
Technology offers a lot of opportunities to shrink the distance between people and allow for greater communication, yet the ability to seed an active online community of practice remains elusive to many organizations.
Articulate’s Storyline community is an example that anyone looking to develop a thriving, online community of practice would be well-served to observe and emulate.
Online Water Cooler
One of the things I thought I’d miss most when I transitioned from working in an office to working with a team that’s 100% virtual is the ability to just get up and walk to someone else’s desk to talk through a challenge or the ability to sit down with people in a lunchroom and find myself in the middle of a conversation that helped me identify learning needs or talk through a problem I’d been having.
It turns out I haven’t missed out on many “water cooler conversations” at all. Our team uses Slack, which we keep open all day.
We share information about our projects and even team members who are directly involved in certain projects can chime in and share their thoughts and ideas.
Though we only see each other a handful of times each year, having Slack open during our workday allows us to also engage in silly conversations, update each other on our weekends and entertain each other with animated gifs.
Meeting Face to Face
Remote meetings and conference calls allow many opportunities for “multi-tasking” (which often is code for not paying attention to whomever is speaking in order to catch up on email or Facebook messages).
Using the video feature on a tool like Zoom can help people who have gone through online training to connect faces with names and further develop relationships by ensuring everyone is present and paying attention during meetings.
Intentional, face-to-face interactions, a forum for constant informal communication and borrowing some ideas from organizations that have thriving communities of practice are three ways to keep virtual learning going long after the LMS says that someone has completed a course.
Post-Conference Activities
Two people I respect very much in the learning and development space, Nancy Bacon and Mark Nilles, published a short eBook for conference planners on how to design a more effective conference. I think there are some key lessons in there for anyone who works in the training space.
I was particularly drawn to Chapter 4: Make it stick: Post-conference activities. What struck me most was how you can replace the word “conference” with “training session” and most of the ideas hold true.
In this chapter, Nancy and Mark describe three activities you can take to reinforce the learning after the event:
- Implement a booster program
- Offer post-conference discussion groups
- Incentivize blogging by participants
Training is a Process, Not an Event
I’ve long-maintained that training should be a process, not an event. By engaging any of the activities that Nancy and Mark describe in this chapter (and selecting the appropriate approach depends on both your audience as well as your available bandwidth to continue engaging your participants after the event), your participants have access to post-event support to put their new learnings into action. Without this support, the odds that key learnings are effectively put into action decrease dramatically.
Whether you’re a training designer or a conference planner, I recommend giving Nancy and Mark’s eBook a read. It’s short (only about 30 pages). Then come back here and let me know what you think and how you think it might be applied to your world.
