Making Training Useful: 4 Tips

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

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At some point during a project, the project manager may be called on to facilitate or create some sort of training for the project team. The project manager should be able to create training that will be useful and interesting to the training audience. This training might happen at the beginning of the project when team members need to understand the process or the concepts that will be used on the project, or it might happen in the middle of the project when new team members are hired or processes have been changed.

The following items will help the project manager focus the training session and make it useful to the team instead of just another meeting to check off a “to do” list.

Engage the Audience
The first rule of good training is to engage the audience. Very few people learn by just listening to someone lecture; most people just fall asleep. Engaging the audience can mean creating role-playing scenarios or splitting into small groups to discuss case studies. It might simply be spending some time asking for feedback or asking review questions at certain points throughout the session.

Whatever tool that is used to engage the audience, it should fit into the training material; trying to force something that does not fit will simply lead to disengaging the audience. For example, training on entering time into the schedule tracking system does not…

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