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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We all want to motivate our learners. Motivating learners during the training so they’ll have a better chance to learn is important, obviously. And it’s also important to motivate learners AFTER the training so they’ll be more positively disposed toward the topic in general and more likely to apply the training at work.

But how exactly does a good trainer motivate learners? One good place to look for tips is in the book Developing Attitude Toward Learning by the noted human performance improvement/learning theorist Robert Mager.

In this article, we’ll pass on some of the tips from Mager’s book. Of course, we recommend you buy the book and read it yourself. In fact, we recommend that you buy and read the entire “Mager Six Pack.” We’ve included more about Mager and the Six Pack at the bottom of this article. (more…)

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