Novice trainers make many common mistakes. These include teaching too much or too little at one time, telling without demonstrating, a lack of patience, a lack of preparation, failure to build in feedback, and failure to reduce tension. I decided to survey Velsoft staff members to find out their top tips for trainers. Here are the training tips they provided:

  • Listen to understand, and not to respond
  • Don’t assume a silent audience means they understand. Pause and ask for questions and feedback frequently.
  • Make it fun! The more fun participants are having, the more likely they will learn. So, adapt your training to suit your learners and how they learn; apply variety and change up your delivery style to align with your participants.
  • Involve participants as much as you can. Have them help you set the agenda, guide activities, and lead discussions.
  • Tie everything back to the workplace. It’s no good knowing information unless participants understand how to use it.
  • Provide some real examples, give them some tips, and let participants talk and share their experiences with others.
  • Always shake hands with each participant and introduce yourself as they come into the classroom. It breaks the ice and sets the type of friendly atmosphere that is conducive to learning.
  • Bring extra activities with you in case you have extra time to fill.
  • Be ready to learn yourself.

What’s in the Pipeline:

  • Ben is finishing custom projects and starting new ones.
  • Carol is refreshing courses and editing custom projects.
  • Chris is adding text-to-speech audio to our entire course library.
  • Clare is changing covers for our course packages.
  • Jan is working on CA course components and eLearning QA.
  • Sydney is on vacation this week (missing her).
  • Dylan is working on custom projects.

Tech Topics:

  • Fixed an issue causing TTS audio not play in the connector courses.
  • Fixed an issue causing some SCORM packages not to load properly in the LMS.

Course Count:

Courses released this month:

Microsoft Word Online

GDPR Readiness: Getting the Message Out

Here is the official count of courses for both courseware and eLearning, broken down by Computer and SoftSkills.

Computer SoftSkills Total Courses
Courseware 283 172 453
eLearning 910 167 1077

Training Statistics

(Thanks to shiftelearning)

  • Companies with less than 100 employees average 12 minutes of training every six months (for companies of 100 to 500, it drops to six minutes in six months).
  • One in three employees leave their organization within the first year.
  • 70 per cent of people say training and development opportunities influence their decision to stay with a company.
  • 68 per cent of managers feel their training programs do not meet their learners’ needs.