Training for Success – Lessons from a Day-in-the-Life Approach

Have you ever participated in a training session for a new process or software, where you learned lots of details but still couldn’t do the work?

There are many tips and tricks for a successful training session. 

One tactic that works well is a day in the life.

Once there was a project where a lot of effort had gone into collating everything a field worker could need to complete their work.

This carried over to the first training session.  The team had logically organized the training by functional area of the app, for example view open work, clock on to work, etc.  For each functional area, the basic principle was shown followed by the conditional actions and helpful features that workers might want to use and investigate.

After the first training session, the feedback scores averaged three out of five stars.  We didn’t have a benchmark to know if this was an issue, but we knew we wanted better.

More concerning was retention by the trainees.  Workers had got lost in all the features and didn’t know how to tie them together.  They were also weak on individual process tasks, confusing one set of steps with the purpose of a different set.

The outcome was particularly concerning because we’d invested in small group face to face trainings specifically to avoid these issues.

We reworked the content for the second session.  We removed non-core details, leaving them for follow up tips after the go-live.  More subtle but more significant, we tweaked the presentation style.  Rather than describing features, the focus shifted to the flow of a work order through the app, stepping through the story of the worker’s updates.

The improvement was clear.  Feedback ratings moved to four out of five.  More importantly, trainees started to retain the patterns of how to update their work into the app.

There’s more to training than just walking the story.  For example, for the third session we generated sample work days for the participants to step through and the training results improved further.

If your training sessions feel packed with information but low on impact, walking through the story might be the missing piece.  Since that first rework of the content, all training now follows the story method, and we haven’t looked back.