Running Your Own Training Course Successfully

Midway, my friends! Something I don't like to do: present in front of people. I have to do it at times though, including some stuff of my own I've put together on taking useable photos and business writing 101. I'm certainly not an expert though, but here are some tips from someone who might be, Jessie from across the pond:

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It is a fact universally acknowledged that there are a lot of courses out there. You only have to type in the subject or area of expertise and hit enter and away the search engine flies, an insanely fast Retriever that brings back far too many options. However, though the choice may be endless, the quality is all important. Indeed, many professionals are at a level in their careers that they see the substance of these courses lacking – perhaps they have even been on courses that didn’t quite deliver (or that definitely didn’t deliver, infuriatingly so) and felt cheated of their time and money – and so seek to provide their own, properly researched and expertly delivered alternative.

Use What You Know, and Then Some

Successfully creating your own training course is, to put it mildly, a massive undertaking. Further, you don’t want to let your day-to-day job suffer for it, either, even though you aren’t offering the course for free. Your own course creation is not something to attempt when first starting out, however, thinking you know it all (new graduates, turn back now); this is for the people who have been there and done that in the real world, and are ready to teach those eagerly coming up behind them a few tips and tricks for tomorrow. Indeed, that care for others, formed from your own experiences, is a crucial part in formulating a course that connects with its participants.

PowerPoint is Your Frenemy

It is also a truth universally acknowledged that, no matter how lucky you have been in the past, at some in your life PowerPoint will fail you (most likely in a spectacular, memory-making way). Indeed, how many people have painstakingly prepared a presentation for delivery to a handful, a small group, even a large room full of people, and then had the lauded technology fall embarrassingly short of expectations? Too many to count, certainly, and yet PowerPoint is a key part of lessons that aids your hard-crafted syllabus immeasurably. A tough call, but you have to face the fear and give the technology another chance: your students will thank you for it.

The Exam and the Farewell

Every training course has to have a closing exam, obviously, finishing up with you getting busy with the certificate maker and officially deeming the participants “trained”. After all, you need to be sure that your output was very much inputted to the brains of those who chose your course to undertake that further beneficial training they had been looking for. Nonetheless, it takes time to write up a proper paper that asks the right questions, but which have set answers.

Depending on what you have been teaching, essay-type questions that require an elongated and detailed answer can be a more expedient way to go at first consideration, but just make sure you have the time to read what’s been written, multiplied by the amount of students on the course. Perhaps routine-answer questions are worth the extra time in the first place, after all.

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