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.

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.

Yes and No. In a sense the traditional concept of “teacher” is one which has diminishing impact. The notion of what a teacher is and does is changing and being increasingly replaced and extended by the role of guide and mentor. More than “redundant”, teachers are at risk of becoming irrelevant. No longer are teachers the bastions of knowledge and harbingers of a single, right way of doing things. Moreover, learners are not looking for that structured, linear style of learning either. In a Post-Google world, learners are wired to use networks and search engines to find answers quickly.

I continue to be amazed at how little preparation seems to go into presentations. Outside of our training and assessment space, I do get an opportunity to see a range of presentations via conferences and workshops and whilst the presenters tend to have good subject matter knowledge they seem to lack an ability to plan for an effective transfer of this. Therefore, I thought it was timely to share my seven easy steps for success when session planning.