It is a fact that people are more likely to learn when they are motivated to do so. Here are three practical steps you can take to get people motivated about the courses you run:
- Before the course—sell rather than tell
- During the course—challenge your learners
- After the course—assess their learning
Sell Rather Than Tell
Should you force managers to attend your in-house courses or should you just hope the right people will attend? The answer lay somewhere between these two extremes.
Sadly, we run many in-house programs in which participants have been forced to attend. While some of these people are happy to learn, many of them spend their time being difficult and disruptive, wasting the opportunity and interfering with the process for their fellow participants. Not only are people more likely to benefit from courses that they have chosen to attend, the atmosphere of the entire program is noticeably different.
However, you should not simply let people know that courses are available and then hope that some attend. Motivating potential learners takes more than leading them to water and hoping that they drink. Your role is to make them thirsty, and this involves the art of selling. Marketing 101 states that you do not sell anything by describing its features or talking about how good it is. Rather, you need to show how your course can help managers with their problems, fears and desires.
Challenge Your Learners
While having a group of learners who actually want to participate is a very good start, you can further increase motivation and in turn maximise the efficacy of the course by challenging participants to move outside of their comfort zones.
Novelty is perhaps the most common way to challenge learners during their training. Try incorporating some unusual activities into your program. Just remember that what was once fresh and new can quickly become overused and lose its novelty as it becomes mainstream. Another way to challenge learners is to give them difficult tasks in which they must apply what they’ve learned. For example, we often ask small groups to present a persuasive proposal to the board (i.e., the other participants) when we run training on how to influence others. A third way to challenge learners is to incorporate activities in which people must work with conflicting points of view.
Assess Their Learning
People are more likely to be motivated to learn when they know that their learning will be assessed. Unfortunately, in our field, certificates are often issued just for turning up regardless of whether any learning has actually occurred.
At minimum, you want participants to know that they are expected to understand the material covered in your course. This can be achieved through a traditional test, which thanks to technological advancements, can be taken and scored online with very little effort on your part. Of course, knowledge alone is not enough. Ideally, you want people to go about their work differently after attending your course. Therefore, you want them to know that you will be assessing their ability to perform certain skills, both in isolation and on the job. You can build on-the-spot skill assessment into the course itself by having participants work on practice drills in small groups. During these drills, one person takes on the role of observer, making notes (criteria sheets are useful here) and then offering feedback to their colleagues. You can conduct post-program assessment of on-the-job changes in behaviour using a simplified survey form administered to each participant’s colleagues.
Each of the participants attending your training is going to arrive with a different level of motivation depending on their demeanour and circumstances. But by following these and other successful strategies, you can optimise the overall effectiveness of your program. Do you have additional strategies or techniques you’ve found useful?
