Webinar trainings can combine the best of both live and online learning. Trainees get to interact with a live trainer who makes learning fun and memorable. Corporate Learning departments save considerable money on travel, minimize meeting expenses and conserve the precious resource of employee time. Unfortunately, webinar training is difficult to do well.
Learning via webinar is inherently a passive experience. This means that your trainer and training materials need to work very hard to engage and reengage trainees sitting at their desks in front of computers. We have learned a lot about how to do this well over the past five years and would like to offer corporate learning leaders this guidance for how to hire an excellent webinar trainer.
In order to gauge how effective a trainer and her training material will be, first request a sample of her work in short video form or ask to sit in on a live webinar training. Here’s what you should look for when vetting your potential trainer’s work:
- A great trainer NEVER reads words on the screen that her audience can read at the same time. Why? Slides filled with text read out loud by a trainer offer a guaranteed trip to Dullsville.
- Effective trainers are first and foremost practiced speakers who know how to keep their audience’s attention. Furthermore, a great trainer, even if she in reality is reading a script, will have rehearsed enough in advance to be able to present the material in a comfortable and conversational way. Trainers who let their personalities shine through gain an invaluable rapport with trainees.
- Effective training webinars are interactive.
- To keep trainees’ attention and to make sure that they’re learning, the trainer must keep the audience “talking” and providing feedback OFTEN. Good trainers employ every interactive capability that webinar platforms offer. Engaging with polls, chats, raising hands and whiteboard input all keep trainees wide awake, reinforce important points and cement learning.
- Look for storytelling techniques that keep trainees wondering what will happen next. If a trainer can weave one interesting narrative illustrating the material throughout the training, this can be very effective at piquing and maintaining trainee interest. Short stories woven throughout will also stimulate emotional interest along with intellectual curiosity.
- Onscreen visual engagement is key!
- Static, unmoving slides are easy to tune out and ignore. Effective training webinars bring movement to each and every slide to stimulate the visual processing area of trainees’ brains. When we want to make a point more memorable, we animate it in some way. This doesn’t mean that we use every cheesy animation technique in the PowerPoint toolkit: we don’t. But we do get and keep our trainee’s attention with images and short text blocks that appear, fly in, pulse and radiate.
- An effective trainer will offer fresh thinking.
- Good trainers should surprise you. Their scripts and training decks should contain material you hadn’t thought of, presented in ways you haven’t seen before. If a presentation has a “been there, done that” feel to you, your trainees will surely tune it out.
The next time you engage a trainer or training company to develop a single training or an entire curriculum, keep these guidelines in mind. We’re confident that they will help you and your company train effectively while keeping your trainees’ happy too.
Noetic teaches engaging and effective live and live webinar-based courses on marketing topics such as:
- Customer-centric marketing
- Writing effective Marketing Briefs
- How to Review Creative effectively
- Creative problem solving for Marketers
- And more
Our courses help marketing departments provide a strong marketing foundation for younger employees while providing new skills or refresher courses to more seasoned employees.
We would be delighted to discuss one or more of our marketing trainings with you.