ATDChi's Training Today

With so many modes of training delivery available to learning and development (L&D) professionals - online, blended, synchronous, asynchronous, mobile - it's common to ask whether a traditional face-to-face workshop is necessary to meet the needs of the business. In many cases, it's not. When it is, though, we have a responsibility to make this mode of delivery worth the investment in time and resources. 

I often make the comment in workshops—especially when the class is for internal trainers or SMEs preparing to lead their own workshops—that the best teacher-training I ever received occurred at my first job, the three years I worked as a high school English teacher. No group of learners of any age or occupation is more brutally honest. No group has been more willing to tell me exactly what I was doing wrong in the moment as a classroom full of 15-year-olds. It was a humbling and great experience.

A presentation skills workshop participant recently said, “I don’t want to simplify this slide. The abundance of the data is where the story is.”

As his coach, I couldn’t argue with that. This is exactly why those one-size-fits-all rules about the amount of data on a slide don’t work.