In today’s fast-paced world, keeping learners engaged can be a difficult task. No trainer or mentor wants to conduct training sessions in which the participants are zoned-out or too bored to respond. However, once you learn how to make training interactive and cater to diverse audiences, streamlined HR processes help ensure the entire process runs smoothly.
Let’s discover this guide and learn how to make training content engaging, its benefits, and different strategies to go about it.
As the name suggests, interactive training is about making a training session or workshop interactive or engaging. The primary goal is to capture the audience's attention so their concentration remains high and they feel invested in the learning content. It also boosts their active learning, encourages them to participate in the discussions and activities being held, and retain the acquired knowledge effectively.
Interactive training methods include various forms of learning, and all of them focus on keeping the employees present and active during the training. Some of the different types of interactive training are:
Benefits Of Interactive Training Method
Let’s dive into the benefits of interactive training methods and see why they are important for better employee engagement and learning:
1. Fun Learning Leads To Harmonious Workplace
When employees participate in group activities that are part of a training or learning program, they lose the fear of being ‘out of line’, not performing well, or being monitored. This boosts their spirits and leads to full participation in the activity.
Apart from having a fun time, they also retain the acquired knowledge in a better way and foster good relationships with the rest of the workforce. These periods of fun learning are crucial to create a harmonious workplace. For instance, a survey conducted by ClearCompany showed that 82% of employees found team-building activities an effective source of fostering good employee relationships.
2. Leveraging Soft Skills
Soft skills, such as communication and team spirit, are not paid much attention to. These are, however, vital qualities for building a strong workforce and fostering positive employee relationships. When interactive learning activities are organized, employees get to interact with other team members in a different capacity that is devoid of any work-related stress, and this is beneficial for their professional development.
3. Fosters Critical Thinking
Fun training sessions are a good source to stretch employees’ abilities and encourage them to think deeper. By being at the center of learning experience, employees are pushed to be analytical and critical with their judgement. This not only sharpens their skills, but equips them with new knowledge, leading to an improved skillset and better analytical thinking.
4. Immediate Feedback
Interactive training is an efficient method for collecting immediate feedback. Participants do not have to wait for days or hours after the session to find out how well they performed or assess their own standing. Additionally, by observing varying learning patterns of employees, the training sessions can be made more dynamic and inclusive.
Some effective sources to collect feedback include digital surveys or live polls during learning workshops. Additionally, leverage advanced tools, including Google Forms or Slido to achieve maximum results.
5. Inclusive Source Of Information
A workforce consists of different people, holding different job positions, and having varying learning and information retaining methods. For instance, some participants prefer visual learning, and multimedia elements serve them best. On the contrary, some find written content to be easily comprehensible and reports or essays can help them retain information easily.
Interactive training is one such source to serve all people at once. By incorporating several learning strategies, including videos and PowerPoint presentations, graphs and statistics, all employees feel valued and can learn new skills.
The core objective of making learning sessions fun is to encourage the participants to engage, learn, and improve their skills. Given below is a list of seven strategies you can adopt to achieve this goal:
1. Be Fun
Be enthusiastic about your work, but do not let it drain you. If a training session is not as interactive or interesting as you planned it to be, do not get worked up about it. You will get many more chances to perfect your sessions. Talk to participants and share snippets from your life, both the courageous and embarrassing ones. Make the session memorable, and engagement will follow.
2. Arrange Group Activities
Group projects, discussions, and peer-to-peer evaluations are a great source of influencing participants to ponder, analyze, and discover new things. Moreover, asking insightful yet fun questions that get them self-discover solutions and initiate group discussions is another effective way to achieve your goal.
You can divide participants into small groups and assign them a problem to solve. Give them 10 minutes to discuss and present their solutions to the larger group. This will increase engagement and improve the training outcome.
3. Incorporate Games
Games are another efficient way to engage participants and help them effectively retain new information. If it is an online training session, you can leverage a learning management system (LMS) that provides gamification features and help learners have a fun time. TalentLMS, for instance, empowers users to customize their courses. By rewarding winners with badges and points, and displaying their names on leaderboards, you can motivate them and increase the learning outcome.
4. Add Multimedia Elements
Another ideal way to keep learners engaged is to incorporate multimedia in your training sessions. Videos, audios, and images break long monotonous blocks of text and get learners hooked.
5. Quick Evaluations
Simulations, rapid-fire questions, and on-the-spot evaluations are a great source of providing learners insight into their skills. Participants can gauge their progress and identify the areas that need improvement. Along with increasing employee engagement, this is also an effective way to inspire learners to push their limits and achieve big.
6. Personalize The Sessions
It is common knowledge that each person has different learning styles, and one method cannot be applied to all. The same holds true for group training and learning sessions. To achieve maximum results, leverage artificial intelligence (AI) tools to curate personalized learning content for you. This ensures the content caters to the audience’s dynamic learning needs.
7. Micro-Learning
When it comes to instructing others, adopt a ‘cut to the chase’ approach. It is the era of YouTube shorts, Instagram and TikTok reels, and a major chunk of our population struggles with short attention span. To accommodate all such learners, try making ‘bite-sized’ modules, that are just the right amount of information and easy-to-remember. This way, learners will not lose interest and retain information in an effective manner.
Keeping participants engaged can be a challenging task, but once you learn what interests them, it becomes a whole lot easier. The crux is to identify what works the best for your participants, and then leverage it to its full potential. Quizzes, games, rewards, group activities, and immediate feedback are some practical methods to make learning interactive but do not restrict yourself to these. Explore other options and choose the ones that align best with your company culture.