I’ve been reading many upbeat accounts of presentations and experiences during the recent ASTD ICE. But what happens when an industry conference is a terrible experience?
There are a number of learning and development blogs that have recently focused on how to maximize your experience at a conference. The Elearning Guild’s blog, TWIST, has begun a series called “What’s in your conference bag” which highlights ways that various learning professionals prepare for attending a conference. Michelle Baker’s Phase(Two)Learning blog recently ran a contrarian post on ways to have a bad time at a conference. And the Learning Rebels have run a series of posts offering perspectives and take-aways from the recent ASTD ICE. If you or someone you know is getting ready to attend a conference, I highly recommend reading these articles (or passing them along) – tons of tips, ideas and strategies to make the most of your investment in professional development.
As learning professionals, we get pretty psyched about the opportunity to attend training events and conferences. What about the other 99.7% of working professionals? The attorneys who are required to attend workshops to earn CLEs and the medical professionals who go to conferences to earn CMEs? What about the array of other professionals who need to attend training to maintain professional certifications and the employees required to attend industry conferences for whatever other reasons?
While I read a lot of enthusiasm from my colleagues in the training field, I spend the weekends listening to non-training professionals and friends complain about the recent, mind-numbingly boring conferences, symposiums, workshops, compliance training and professional development sessions.
How do training professionals make an impact on the presentation skills of those who do not have words like “training” or “talent development” or “learning” in their title?
Nobody wakes up in the morning and says: “I hope my audience walks away complaining about how boring I was today!” My hypothesis is that many presenters lack the basic awareness of what an amazing learning experience can be, and more importantly they lack competence in how they can transform a room into a vessel of learning, engagement and behavior change.
In an effort to begin to raise that awareness, I recently created a short elearning program – it’s a sort of murder mystery called “Death by Boredom”.
Click here to check it out. Have fun with it. And if you know someone who has an upcoming presentation, feel free to pass this along to them. See if they can identify any presentation elements they’d like to bring into their own presentations… and any elements they’d like to do away with.
