Congrats! You’ve identified a technical skills gap, and have decided to address it with technical training. You’ve outlined realistic learning goals, you know exactly which topics you want the training to include, and you’ve built a basic curriculum. Now, you need to tie it all together and give your training program a coherent structure. This is where you get into the nitty-gritty details of planning your program and there are so many decision to make that it’s common for otherwise superb program managers to breeze through this last step. Rather than succumb to planning fatigue, however, it’s worth it to take some time to really think through the details and organization of your plan – after all, structure can make or break a training program!
To help you out, we focused the fourth and last webinar in our ‘How To Launch A Technical Training Program’ series on this last, most crucial step of defining your program’s structure. We asked Doug Darst, Treehouse’s Director of Engineering, and Julie Menge, our HR Generalist, to share their experience structuring effective training programs.
If you couldn’t make it to the webinar, don’t worry – you can catch the on-demand recording of it here.
First, they explained that the easiest place to start when thinking about structure, is at the end. What is the goal or desired outcome? By reverse engineering your structure, you ensure that every decision you make supports your learning initiatives. To simplify the process, they also gave a break down of the two most common goals that training programs are aligned around, and gave clear examples of each to help you identify which type your program you have.
There are too many elements that make up training programs to cover in one webinar, so Doug and Julie chose the five components they think have the biggest impact on outcomes and outlined best practices for each.
They went over how to complete assessments at the beginning and end of your program, how to organize teams, best practices for choosing the content (scope) and pacing of your programs to keep learners engaged, and finally, when and how to get employees started applying their new skills.
Last, they gave you a few next steps, which included a link for a handy, interactive workbook with worksheets for each of the five components covered in the webinar. The workbook is handy not just for program managers to help organize their thoughts, but also as a way to easily share information with your learners/employees, their managers and other stakeholders within your organization.
If you’re getting ready to tackle your program’s structure, or want access to the program structure workbook, check out the full webinar here. If you’re just hearing about our webinars, don’t worry – you can catch the whole series, on-demand, here.