How to Design a Training Course

Key Takeaways

you know one of the reasons why most training courses are a complete waste of time is they end up being dry presentations about the topic instead of what they can be which is a dyamic workshop on the real challenges that participants are currently facing I mean supposing you were being wheeled in for an operation and you said to the surgeon you done many like this before and they said well no I've never done an operation before but I've attended plenty of PowerPoint presentations on the topic you'd run a mile and if you were teaching people how to repair washing machines you'd have washing machines there for them to work on but for some reason when it comes to core people skills I hate the term soft skills by the way it's St core people skills like managing leading negotiating coaching all that seems to go and people think you just need to present PowerPoint about it there's been many times people have come to me and said cuz I had some seen some sort of knowledge of this come to me and said me and my Chum we're thinking of putting together a training course on what we do and it might have been some approach to sales or or a Consulting skills technique and they'd say you know what advice have you got for us and I'd always say the same thing which is have as little PowerPoint as possible quickly get on to a case study and if possible real oh it's fine don't worry oh yeah couldn't agree more I hate training courses that are just PowerPoint we are going to do a case study and we're going to spend most of the time on we we we are going to have a a few slides but they just be to introduce the topic right at the start and I'd say well okay if you really mean it off you go and I'd catch up with them a few weeks later and how's your course going oh it's good you know we we're quite pleased the way our case study is coming along how many PowerPoint slides have you got oh well we we do have 48 slides but honestly most of them are just you know the sign post and way we won't spend long on that anyway I'll catch up with them after the course how did it go oh um it was all right it's a shame we didn't have time to do the case study though we ended up spending all the time on the PowerPoint slides oh you know you can go back to the last Millennium God I'm old in the 1990s for example I was running a people management course that didn't have any slides and before you ask yes we did have PowerPoint in the 1990s well I said I'm not having any of that no no screen no projector nothing I put the chairs in a circle someone said it look like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting but what I did is I had a case study just on slips of paper that you could reuse news very short brief for the team member who go out of the room to prepare very short brief for the manager you know the new hire the Arrogant so and so the person coming in late and the rest of the team would help the manager prepare for their meeting and then we'd get them in do a bit of a role play stop it quite quickly get some feedback some discussion maybe try another approach and so on or so forth re dealing with real like situations but the real killer it was only about a six-hour course after the break I got the participants under conditions of strict confidentiality to write their own case studies about real challenging situations they were facing in their real work and we'd talk about you know difficult team members that were facing a ways of dealing with it and other courses I ran on uh influence skills or coaching skills whatever we would quickly come to addressing the participants current challenges and not only did that obviously help a lot more than some PowerPoint presentation but by addressing their real current situations we were able to help them identify potential learning barriers and I've got another video on learning barriers the internal barriers that would stop them feeling comfortable trying new techniques so able to discuss those and find ways of dealing with them and it wasn't unusual for me to get an email saying I attended your coaching skills course a few weeks ago and as a result of that I completely reorganized the team reorganized the way the work's done and it's had a complete transformation everyone's much happier we're much more productive it's it's been you Ian do your training courses get emails like that as a response and yet still you know this is back in the 1990s nothing's changed I'm recording this in 2025 and I came across a company just very recently that said we want to transform the way people management is done in our company great we don't think doing it virtual will do the job we want to get people together in a classroom for half a day fantastic my advice don't have slides go oh we have got a case study we got a case study so let me ask you this a 4-Hour training course getting people together in a room busy managers who might have to travel 4 hours in the room how many slides do you think they ended up with 50 eight slides for a 4-Hour course about 4 minutes per slide less once you subtract the time for people to come to the room and settle down and do introductions I mean of those 58 14 were just dividers slides that had no purpose 18 were just content information that could have been handed out or or done online um there were various energizers that they were never going to have time for 20 slides just to explain the case study it's not that complicated well I I don't know how they're getting on but I did hear that the pilot was a bit disappointing because they ended up spending all the time on the slides look it's not rocket science um scrap all your slides okay get people into room if you're going to do it or into a virtual space have a prepared case study based on real situations from your organization but very quickly move on to talk about the current challenge they're facing and I've helped people prepare for meetings with a difficult client prepare for having that awkward conversation they've had with their boss it it's it's so different from the dry PowerPoint now I'm retired now so if you want any help with this very happy to help you you'll find me on LinkedIn find me there send me a message quite happy to have a chat with you about how you can dump this dreary PowerPoint durge and instead really help people transform the way they work this was a video from my channel 5 MTC which stands for five minute training courses Please Subscribe for more and maybe find my book on Amazon