Excerpt: You’re a training instructor. Your job is to providetraining to your employees, other supervisors, management, or to staffpersonnel. The most important part of your job is to properly prepare for yourpresentation. Your job is to research the material and to make sure you notonly understand the subject, but are prepared to answer questions on theinformation you’re presenting. Generally, the rule of thumb is that it takes 40hours of preparation to present 1 hour of instruction. Let’s face it.Supervisors have a big responsibility, and they’re busy. They have many thingsto do and training is an extra burden on their responsibilities. If you stop tothink about it, training is one of their most important responsibilities.Training improves productivity, safety, awareness, and makes their employeesmore knowledgeable and effective in their jobs. How do you present moreeffective training sessions? First, you prepare for the training. If it’s a5-min meeting, or an all-day meeting, you prepare. You want to determine whatthe goal of the training is, and how you’re going to achieve that goal. What doyou want the students to learn? List the objectives of the training, and thekey points you want to cover. Make your lesson outline from this list. Why isit important that you make a lesson outline? First of all it’s the map to getyou where you want to go. Secondly, a lesson outline serves as documentation ofthe training you’re presenting. 5 years from now, legal or other action mayrequire you to prove what was presented in that training program. Without alesson 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 thesafety field conducting a very short training session. He is well prepared, hasa lesson plan, has researched the subject, and is prepared to answer questionson 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 thetraining class. As you can see he refers to the lesson outline quitefrequently. He understands the subject, but he wants to make sure the keypoints of the presentation are covered. He was well prepared, knowledgeable andpresented the material in an understandable way.