Hi folks, it has been just over 12 months since my last post. In that time I have had what could be described as a forgettable year in 2015. After a heart attack in February, I took a sabbatical to recover and to be fully focused on my health. Despite the obvious need to do this and the signals my body was giving me to slow down, this was a tremendously difficult thing to do. I felt that I wasn’t making the contributions that I should have been and this had a really negative effect on my mental state.

Aside from building subject-matter knowledge, timing would be the next biggest challenge for new trainers and trainers of new material. It is often difficult to accurately ascertain how long material will take to cover and equally problematic to identify appropriate timeframes for learner activity. As such, trainers need to work strategies into their planning that will give them some flexibility when delivering and enable them to do more with the time they have.

There are a plethora of articles out there focused on helping the classroom trainer to engage with their audiences. However, there seems to be a real dearth of content to support the virtual trainer. Given the explosion of webinars as a virtual facilitation tool in recent years we owe it to these participants to identify ways to strengthen their learning experience. Rather than trying to take our classroom resources and make them fit the online space, we need to underpin the journey with sound andragogy.

In reality, a great dessert can help to complete a successful meal. A bad dessert leaves a sour taste in your mouth that can ruin the whole dining experience. In the context of training, the dessert relates to how we close. We want them to have something to savour from the experience that, like a multi-course meal, brings everything together. For many years, I have preached about the virtues of a powerful close through my trainer training programs. Good training closes, bad training ends. You owe it to your participants to finish the session with impact.