Entertaining Yes, But Is It Moving The Needle?

People who discuss ways to make training more engaging often describe ways to entertain a captive audience. Throw a video up on screen, tell a few funny stories, and the time in the classroom or webinar flies. Four things happen:

• At the end of the day, your "smile-sheet learner surveys" will be loaded with great scores and comments.
•  At the end of the month, there will be no measurable improvement in performance, unless you incorporate these entertaining elements with a well focused eye.
• At the end of the quarter, you receive a request to conduct a refresher course on the same topic.
• At the end of the year, your training department faces a battle to retain credibility and defend its effectiveness.

We live in a time where there is limitless potential to improve the quality and long term effectiveness of our training programs.  Instead of creating content, we can track down information in the form of blogs, videos, and whitepapers.  We can have learners generate content 140 characters at a time, show them ways to use technology to solve real world problems, and have them conduct online scavenger hunts to locate pictures and articles that, if read, may help solidify concepts. We can spend more time being training architects than being training builders.


In theory, whatever you want to know is on the internet. How do we leverage that vast treasure trove for our learners?  How do we separate the golden nuggets from the vast amounts of digital nonsense? Can we do it without developing additional deliverables?

The dreams of these limitless possibilities should be tempered with a reality check. The instant assumption is that when your training organization spends less time developing content, the time it takes from the initial training demand to the roll out will be drastically reduced. That isn't always the case.

Though you may save time on individual tasks, your energies must become focused elsewhere to ensure the learner gets what he or she needs. It often takes more time to plan and engineer an effective training program when your team cobbles together content that was created for a different purpose, with a different audience in mind.

It comes back to the basics. When you incorporate existing content, it's important to keep training fundamentals in mind. Whatever form the content is in and no matter how cool or entertaining it is, it has to answer the following questions satisfactorily:

• Is the content on point? Does it hit on your key training themes? If it doesn't, it may generate confusion.
• If the content is off point, how much work will it take to make it fit in with your main themes? Can it be fixed by one or two talking points or will it require more effort? If it requires high effort, is it worth keeping?  We use existing off the shelf content largely to make our lives easier in addition to helping our learners learn. If making it fit causes more angst than developing content, it may make more sense to build it ourselves.
• Are you using the content properly? Is it an effective delivery method?  Could a different method of delivery do the job better? We know that certain content is better suited for certain content. A video may not be as valuable as an interactive demo in some situations, but can be great for providing an example of bad customer service.
•  Are you making the learners think? Are you spoon feeding content or are you setting up an environment where the learners take an active role in interpreting and applying what they are learning? Spoon feeding is okay in some instances, but overuse leads to passive learners and low retention.
• Is the existing content there to facilitate learner interaction or is it being used in place of it? There is a tendency to think that if you provide the content, it's the learner's fault if they don't apply it. However, the learner is not to blame if we do a poor job of helping them connect what they see, hear, and discuss in class to what they need to do on the job. That requires providing opportunities to explore their understanding of the content and to learn from others.
• Is the content more of a distraction than a solution? Will people miss learning opportunities because they are more focused on a Twitter feed or the bad acting in the video than on the information they need to absorb? Will the whitepaper with the clever title lead the class down a rabbit hole? Too often I've seen good training sidetracked by an irrelevant discussion on minutia or irrelevant tangents.
• Is the content accurate? If not, do you have a strategy on ensuring that learners know the difference between good, misleading, and bad information? In the information age, a dude with a blog and something to sell is often more visible than the experts with blogs and 20 years of practical experience under their belts.  Sometimes people need help to distinguish between the two.
• Is the content at the appropriate level for your learners? Is the video too technical? Is the blog post too high level for the class? Are the examples given relevant to your industry or workplace? Participants are more likely to tune out when they don't see how what they are learning relates to what they need to do. They also tend to drift when the content is too complex or too general.

Videos, articles, podcasts, and reference material that were developed outside your organization by non-training professionals find their way into formal training more frequently than ever. It's not necessary to fight the trend and is probably not beneficial. However, it is absolutely essential to make sure we use the content in ways that are consistent with learning theory.  To help our learners get the most from the content we lead them to, we need to look at the individual pieces with these overall goals in mind: The content must fit the theme. It must make the learner think, be relevant, aimed at the learners' levels, and be accurate.If we focus on entertainment value alone as a method of engaging the learner, our successes are short lived.