When you are preparing a live Salesforce training event are you focused on what information you need to deliver or how your audience will use and apply that information?
Most trainers focus primarily on the information they need to deliver and that can be a huge
mistake. Your primary goal when training should be to change behavior not deliver information. You want people to do something different as a result of your training. They can only implement what they can remember. The information that you deliver during your training is irrelevant. All that matters is what your audience can remember and apply.
Our brains can only hold so much
Our brains are only designed to remember three to seven pieces of new information. In my experience, we're much more weighted towards the "three" end of that spectrum than the "seven". That's why phone numbers have previously been seven digits long (area codes significantly complicate our ability to remember phone numbers).
We have all been to corporate training events or conferences where all you see is PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide with tons of text bullets and paragraphs. The training event winds up being a knowledge dump of everything the instructor felt that they needed to deliver. Remember this - nobody likes being dumped on!
Because there's so much information none of that information becomes useful. You can't retain it so you can't apply it.
That's not what you want as a trainer.
Choose 3 to 5 things that your audience will remember
You can't control how much the human brain is designed to retain. But you can control how much information you present and how you organize that information.
When you are planning you're training you have to decide what are the three most important things that your audience will need to remember. You can maybe go as high as five but I think that seven is really pushing it. You need to be confident that your attendees will be able to walk away and repeat the 3-5 most important things that you taught them. It is a hard decision to make but it is crucial to the success of your training. You have to realize that every new bit of information you put into your training decreases the likelihood that people remember anything of the training.
But what about everything else?
Everything else needs to either be reserved for a separate training session or delivered outside of the live training event in a way that the attendees can effectively use it. See this post for how to do this while organizing a one-hour live Salesforce training.
By separating out the information that needs to be remembered from information that can be referenced later on you will make sure that more knowledge gets applied.
Don't just "check a box"
If you dump a ton of information on people you can "check a box" that says you had a training. But that isn't what you want to do. It isn't what is best for your attendees. It isn't what is best for your organization. Consider what your attendees can realistically retain and build that into your training plan.
