Promote Yourself to Write Effective Training Materials

During the time in providing services in your work environment (note 1), you may be encountered with the request to make presentation. The subject you are going to talk about could be (a) external training courses review, (b) project milestone tracking & status update, or (c) essential issues on technology architecture (in a product roadmap). The target learners jump into into your session may be your daily associates, functional manager(s), college professor(s), or Senior Executive Officer(s). Some unexpected audience may arrive in the very last minutes and, no surprise, raising questions.

Maybe this is a good time to ask yourself: when was last time you conduct a successful training session? How does your training materials contribute to the accomplishment of your activity?

Through the years of this type of presentation activities, many people may cultivate personal interests in being professional trainers. This is different from "Teachers College" in Academic Programs to be prepared as a teacher in elementary schools or high schools. It is more to bring up your skills to manage "instructor-led classroom training. Under such circumstances, writing training materials should be a good start. There are some questions to ask yourself: what needs to be highlighted in order to compose and develop training materials?

Learning Objective: What is the learning objective of this training course? It could be only a "Concept Generation & Delivery" session, or Hands-On Programming / Configuration practice. The former category expects training content will influence learner's behavior and (work) activities being involved. The latter item would put emphasize on the familiarity of a specific computer skill.

Learning Content: What kind of topics or domain know how we should put here?
If we are progressing Business Strategy courses content, should we not describe what we have completed? Maybe we can also use some real life case studies to elaborate

• Blue ocean vs red ocean strategies
• The need for change in our Organization (If our company does not go this way, customers will be leaving for our competitors)
• The process of decision making
• The process of influencing your associates in believing a good decision being made
• The modification link in the workflow
• Key Performance Indicators (to be followed)

Should we turn the attention to compose technical training. Take the topic of "Hands-on Programming with R" as an example, we can assist our students to build the knowledge on

• R user interface
• Available packages in R
• R objects and notation
• If statement and else-if statements
• Data visualization with RStudio

Information Display: What would be the sequence of the topics going to be laid out? Would you like to begin your session on some of the core concepts (prerequisite) of this particular subject, giving students a little bid of time to refresh their memory, knowing where they are? Are you taking "easy-to-difficult" flow to get your audience attention, or you prefer to pick up "Use Case" then go into configuration (technology) details?

The writer of this blog utilizes "read the content to himself" tactic to carry out his work here. Is he able to speak fluently and confidently on the continuation of those statements?

Head vs. Tail: The writer here refers to the Beginning Statements and Summary Statements. Your training contents, basing on the size being developed, should be categorized into several sessions. Each session might start with some beginning statements, to remind the learners (a) what had achieved from last session, and (2) what to expect in this session.

In the summary description, may trainers would only talk about what had been taught in this section. For example, in R, in the chapter of "Modifying Values" will relay to logical subsetting and missing information. However, the write of this blog is known as to build co-relationship among topics, especially the functions and topics being told. For example, if the subject is on a switch port settings, he will refer to PoE switch port setting, time schedule availability, coinciding with other parameters. Another example, on the subject of Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), this writer will also reflect (a) the behavior in wired / wireless network, (b) Sub-fields in Wireshark from other vendors. Something like that. 

A delegated trainer is aimed more at winning the support (concrete response) of the learners. Composing training materials is always to be seen as powerful interests standing in the way of another (maybe better, maybe not) lives for the trainer's career. John Dewey once said, "We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience". To take the initiative in write training materials is your first step. Being aware how the learners knowledge can be enhanced, career being upgrade, due to your training materials, is another. 

Note 1: It does not necessary limit to an enterprise facility. School institutions, government agencies, even manufacturing industries are general samples.

Quiz Review: As a senior (network engineering) manager in one of the popular networking equipment manufacturers here in USA, you are assigned to conduct a two-day "TCP/IP Protocol Suite" workshop for the New Hires in Quality Assurance (QA Testing) Dept. 12-students, with relevant work experience less than three years. The objective is to cover all of the work related knowledge and skills as well as the familiarity of testing tools. What would be the course agenda in your training materials for this business engagement? What would be the statements / description in your educational materials?