In an earlier post focusing on identifying job roles and job tasks, we mentioned the importance of creating (1) a list of the job roles at your site and (2) a list of the job tasks that people in each of those job roles have to be able to perform in order to hold their job.

In this post, we’re going to start with the assumption that you’ve created that list of tasks, and we’ll show you how to perform a task analysis for each task on the list. The idea is that you’ll “break down” each task into the smaller steps or sub-tasks that a person would have to perform to finish the task.

The point in doing this is that once you’ve identified the steps or sub-tasks that make up a job task, you’ll know exactly what you need to teach employees who will have to perform the task properly on the job. You would then create learning objectives, assessments, and the actual training materials.

This is an “instructional design” basic. To see how the task analysis fits into the general flow of training development, you may want to check out 8 Steps to Great Training article and/or download the guide to writing learning objectives at the bottom of this article.

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Job training shouldn’t be designed or delivered in a vacuum. And you probably know that.

We’ve written a LOT about how training should be delivered with the learners in mind (the employees, that is). And that’s definitely true and important.

But in this article, we’re going to look at training from a different angle: the connection between training and the business itself–in particular, the goals of a business. And we’ll do that by looking at business goals, key performance indicators (KPIs), and job training.

Sometimes, trainers forgot to consider this and forget to build it into their training, development, delivery, and evaluation process.

So hopefully this will be a good review and reminder.

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Probably the most famous “steps of training” guidance is the one created by the instructional theorist Robert Gagne. Gagne’s ideas are justly well-regarded and we’ve already written an article about Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction. So feel free to click that link you just passed up if you’re curious.

But in their 2003 book Writing Training Materials that Work: How to Train Anyone to Do Anything, Wellesley R. Foshay, Kenneth H. Silber, and Michael B. Stelnicki present their own, more updated steps. What makes these steps especially interesting (and I believe useful) is that they’re grounded in the field of cognitive psychology, the study of how people learn, including things like attention, thinking, memory, and problem-solving.

In this article, we’ll give you an overview of the steps, as you’d guess. And we’ll also present some additional ideas from the book. Of course, we encourage you to buy and read the book on your own, too.

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A lot of workforce training materials are written. This is true if it’s something your workers will actually read. And it’s true of scripts that are used for e-learning training courses as well.

We’ve written earlier about style issues for your written training materials–click here to read more about that. That article includes some simple tips, such as writing at an appropriate reading level, using conversational words, and so on. Later, you may also be interested in reading this interview with Anna Sabramowicz about using storytelling and scenarios in training.

But in this article, we’re going to show you how to format training materials using simple techniques like headers, bullets, and tables to make your training materials more effective. This will apply to materials such as Word documents and PDFs that your employees read but also to PowerPoint presentations and e-learning courses they view on a monitor or screen.

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Companies put a LOT of money, time, and hard work into training their employees. New employee onboarding, job role training, succession training, compliance training–you get the picture.

In many or most cases, that training includes some element of testing. People in learning and development often refer to this testing as “assessment” or “level 2 evaluation” (to learn why, read our article on the Kirkpatrick 4-level Evaluation Model). We’re going to try to use the word “test” as much as possible in this article, though we’ll fall back on assessment from time to time.

The problem many trainers face is that after putting so much work into planning and creating the training materials, it can be easy to give short-shrift to the test part. And that can be a BIG problem because you don’t really know if your employees are learning what they have to learn if you’re not testing in one way or another. So you may be providing training that’s not effective for some, many, or all of your employees and never know it. And that’s why we’re going to focus on tests in this post–testing employees after training. Hope you find some stuff interesting and helpful.

You’ll find that this information includes a lot of high-level, more general information about testing. As a result, you may also find yourself interested in the following, more specific articles too:

• Writing multiple-choice questions
• Writing true/false, matching, dragging, and other types of questions
• Using scenario-based learning and assessments
• Testing and fidelity
• Testing, reliability, and validity 
• The “testing effect” and the forgetting curve 

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If you’re a trainer or design instructional material, your job is to train people.

But what exactly are you training them? What kinds of things? If your initial answer is “stuff for work,” we can dive down a little deeper on that. The benefit of doing so is that once we realize that we train people on different kinds of “stuff for work” (or to speak a little more formally, we train people to help them with different types of learning), you can get a little more efficient and use different training techniques for each of those different types of learning that you want your employees to master.

That’s what we’re going to cover in this blog post. So if that sounds spot-on, continue reading. If you’re not quite sure how you feel about it, keep reading nonetheless, if you can spare the time. You just might find some tips to make the training programs at your workplace more effective and efficient.

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We recently wrote an article with 25 tips graphics and visuals for training materials.

That post was so popular that we thought we’d dig deep again for another article on graphics and learning.

The source for the tips in this article is the book Graphics for Learning: Proven Guidelines for Planning, Designing, and Evaluating Visuals in Training Materials by Dr. Ruth Colvin Clark and Chopeta Lyons.

We hope you like this article, and we recommend you go buy the book, it’s got a million great ideas in it for making better use of graphics and other forms of visuals to improve your training.

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