Raise your hand if you’ve ever attended a class where you learned nothing of value.
Yeah, me too.
Maybe you’re thinking of high school geometry or history. We can debate the merits of a liberal arts education all day, but as an adult in the workplace, it is crucial that any work time spent on training results in valuable new knowledge or skills.
There are a lot of factors that separate an effective training session from a waste of time, so this is a topic I expect I will return to in the future. Today I want to talk about why a subject matter expert (SME) is not necessarily the best person to create and/or deliver training in their area of expertise.
Having knowledge is not the same thing as imparting knowledge.
Imparting knowledge (also known as teaching or training) is a skill set unto itself. This skill set includes:
- The ability to organize information into digestible bites delivered in a purposeful order and format.
- The ability to step into the mindset of a beginner to anticipate questions or points of confusion and avoid pitfalls such as jargon.
- The ability to take the desired results of a training (for example, 25% less staff time taken per customer transaction) and translate them into clear learning objectives.
- The ability to carefully curate the available information and limit the training to only those aspects of the subject that are relevant to the stated learning objectives.
- The ability to engage the learning audience, because a bored audience will retain little to nothing of what they have been taught.
A truly effective training, one with an excellent return on investment for the time and energy put in by both the trainers and the trainees, will likely involve all of the skills listed above. This is why it is so beneficial to involve a skilled instructional designer in the development of the training content, and a skilled trainer in the presentation of that content.
If you are relying on SMEs to create high quality training without any support from training and instructional design professionals, you could be making the costly mistake of wasting a great deal of time for mediocre results.
Agree or disagree? Are there any specific skills that I didn’t mention that you think are crucial in the development of effective training? Let me know in the comments!