Training seems so simple. You have information, you have an audience, and you have a medium of delivery. You should be able to plug the information into the medium of delivery and present it to the audience who absorbs the information through the chosen medium and—ta-da!—completes their training. If only life were so simple.

As readers of this blog are well aware, a lot of thought and effort goes into optimizing training programs, which means there are many opportunities for things to go wrong.

In this series, we will take a close look at four common mistakes that organizations of all sizes make when creating training programs. We’ll also look at solutions for these problems and strategies for eliminating them outright.

The Four Most Common Mistakes in Training
When we asked our Twitter followers what training blunders they commonly ran into, we received many insightful responses. We’ve combined the thoughts of these elearning professionals with our own field-tested insights and came up with the following four mistakes:

1. Ignoring onboarding. This is the most crucial time for the training department, and yet it is frequently overlooked by companies eager to get their new hire on the floor. By taking the time to initiate new hires into company culture and get them started on the right path, you save time correcting future mistakes and decrease the potential for unhappy employees.
2. Falling for the salesperson, not the product. When you’re evaluating vendors for training products or services, if you find yourself having an excellent understanding of the positive qualities your salesperson possesses, but can’t recall the features you discussed, something is wrong. While the training products you use aren’t the only key component to your training program, making clear-headed purchasing decisions is an important foundation.
3. Assuming you have a training problem. Before you get to work developing training, you want to make sure the problems your company is experiencing don’t lie elsewhere. You don’t want to build your training problems on shaky foundations—perceived training issues that are actually unrelated.
4. Training is not a one time event. The modern workplace changes so rapidly that constant training is a necessity. Just as learning is a life-long process, training should also be continuously integrated into an employee’s work experience.

Come back next week, we’ll suggest the most effective ways we know to manage training programs and build a strong, learning culture to support your organization.

About the Author

Kelly Meeker is the Community Manager at OpenSesame, the elearning content marketplace, where she creates, curates and shares with the learning and development community. Find her on her blog at www.OpenSesame.com/blog, on Twitter (@OpenSesame) or at kelly.meeker@opensesame.com.