3 Staff Training and Development Ideas

When Jason asked me this week to prepare a post on staff training and development ideas, I have to admit – shocker – I wasn’t salivating over the opportunity.  The blog has talked a lot about organization learning, gamification, the importance of keeping things simple, and more, so wouldn’t it be a bit repetative? Yet that’s not what this is about today. In this context, what I mean by staff training and development concepts are general things such as activities and practices which may be applied to whatever learning model you’ve chosen to use, be it traditional, organizational, or whatever else you’ve decided works. There are a lot of things that can be done to improve engagement, and make training more effective and to get more out of it (such as team skills, cross training and other benefits). They’re usually simple ideas, but they’re just base ideas. They can be molded to fit into anything, and be built on to become more sophisticated as needs are discovered. The first thing to consider are training games. Training games usually involve gamified mental exercises that develop the base instincts and roots of experience for different scenarios relevant to the training topic at hand. They can also include role playing, and other things which can add to this building set of exercises. There are a ton of training games out there, many specific to different departments being trained, some that are more general. As a result, I can’t actually cite these games specifically here, due to their specialism, but I have discussed more than a few of these at length in the past for different departments. I may do more of those in the future, but for now just know that training games like these are a great extra step to ensure casual learning, which tends to be much more practically applied than strenuous formal learning. Another idea is making meetings less formal, and more of a social gathering. Reducing the sense of pressure and formality makes learning less of a chore, and more of a social event, like a light party or something similar. Serve food, have ice breaker games, and make it an open forum of discussion, questioning and informing. People enjoy this laid back atmosphere, and everyone is more attentive with some good food and a relaxed atmosphere. This is a way to win over trainees into liking the training time as a relaxed different experience from their daily work grind, and this is called engagement in its purest form. Finally, consider self service training, using tutorial and learning programs, which can actively guide a student, to varying, dynamic levels of intervention, gradually training the student in realtime. These systems can cooperate together, and work to train teams or individuals, and make a great metrics and micromanagement tool for trainers to use, which takes a load off of them, so they can apply their attention where it is most needed, in training and guidance. There are a lot of really good, super effective staff training and development ideas, these are just the mainstays that, if you can only read so much of this material, I would have you walk away with, myself. There are plenty more ideas, and of course, higher gamification has a lot of potential, but I didn’t touch on it here because the blog has already discussed it at great length. Get the latest information on training and development articles page.