Excerpt: You’re a training instructor. Your job is to provide training to your employees, other supervisors, management, or to staff personnel. The most important part of your job is to properly prepare for your presentation. Your job is to research the material and to make sure you not only understand the subject, but are prepared to answer questions on the information you’re presenting. Generally, the rule of thumb is that it takes 40 hours of preparation to present 1 hour of instruction. Let’s face it. Supervisors have a big responsibility, and they’re busy. They have many things to do and training is an extra burden on their responsibilities. If you stop to think about it, training is one of their most important responsibilities. Training improves productivity, safety, awareness, and makes their employees more knowledgeable and effective in their jobs. How do you present more effective training sessions? First, you prepare for the training. If it’s a 5-min meeting, or an all-day meeting, you prepare. You want to determine what the goal of the training is, and how you’re going to achieve that goal. What do you want the students to learn? List the objectives of the training, and the key points you want to cover. Make your lesson outline from this list. Why is it important that you make a lesson outline? First of all it’s the map to get you where you want to go. Secondly, a lesson outline serves as documentation of the training you’re presenting. 5 years from now, legal or other action may require you to prove what was presented in that training program. Without a lesson plan or outline no one can explain what was presented.

Now let’s take a look at a training session in progress. This is a professional safety engineer with many years of experience in the safety field conducting a very short training session. He is well prepared, has a lesson plan, has researched the subject, and is prepared to answer questions on the subject should questions arise. He is a competent expert on the subject, but still relies on the lesson plan to make sure key points are covered in the training class. As you can see he refers to the lesson outline quite frequently. He understands the subject, but he wants to make sure the key points of the presentation are covered. He was well prepared, knowledgeable and presented the material in an understandable way.