Two years ago, a professional trainer arrived at a client’s offices, fired up and ready to give a day-long session. He waited for the room to fill, introduced himself, started a video, left the room, and went down the hall to a vacant conference room to his check emails on his phone.

But there was a problem. He had started to show the wrong video. (You saw that coming, right?) To make it even worse, the video started with a glowing profile of a different company – not the company where the training was taking place. When the trainees discovered that they were watching the wrong video, they looked for the trainer, couldn’t find him, so they alerted the company training director in HR. She called the training company, which called the trainer. But of course, they couldn’t reach him because he was down the hall from the training room . . . checking his email on his phone, remember?

Just Plain Dumb

As training mistakes go, that one is just lain dumb. When problems like that happen, people talk about them for a long time.

Then there are less spectacular training mistakes. They fail to attract as much attention but they might be even more damaging, because they cost money and fail to deliver a good ROI on every dollar that companies spend on training.

Here are some of the most common . . .

Teaching skills that employees already know or don’t need – There is no better way to get trainees to tune out and write off training as useless. This mistake can happen when companies purchase off-the-shelf training materials that don’t allow sufficient content customization.

Using training materials that are out of date – Do you really want to showcase products that your company discontinued two years ago? Or to show a retail location that you closed?  And how about a video recorded by an executive who left your company last year? Be sure to update your materials.

Delivering training to platforms where they do not display or work well – Your training materials look and function well on terminals in your company training center, but trainees cannot see or use them on the smartphones you want them to use now. Although this once-common problem is becoming rarer, it hasn’t gone away for good. Your training development company should know how to make sure that your materials will work on the devices your trainees will use.

Failing to identify the most important behaviors to change and skills to teach – Unless a company takes time to identify the needle it wants to move, it is impossible to build effective training.

Failing to identify meaningful metrics for evaluating training success – If you don’t know what to measure before and after training, how can you know whether your training has accomplished anything?

Wishing You a Productive Spring

April Fool’s day won’t last forever . . . or will it? If you would like to make sure your training is hitting all the right targets both today and in the future, we invite you to speak with a Tortal Training consultant.