This post is Part 3 in the three-part series Building a Better Training Program. If you haven’t yet, you may want to read Part 1 and Part 2.

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Imagine this: You’ve signed up for a training seminar called “How to Build an Effective New Hire Onboarding Program.” This is one of your key initiatives for the year, so you’re pumped. You’ve registered and your company has paid good money for you to go spend two hours at this training.

You arrive, grab a seat, the presentation starts. You can’t wait (yea, admit it – you’re an HR dork, just like me). The trainers walks out and starts… and then spends the first 45 minutes talking about why onboarding is important and why you should care.

By the time she gets to the good stuff – building an effective onboarding program – half the audience has zoned out. And when she’s finished, she’s only really given you a surface level look into effective onboarding. The trainer had great information and a captive, willing audience, but the training failed. She didn’t consider her audience.

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Gary Vaynerchuk, blogger and creator of Wine Library TV, had a fantastic (and short) video on his personal blog yesterday titled “I suck!”

Gary spends the first 60 seconds rattling off a list of things he’s horrible at, and then begins to explain how instead of dwelling on what he’s bad at, he’s instead chosen to work his butt off doing things he’s good at.

In HR, we spend a lot of time looking at both strengths and growth areas. There’s an emerging school of thought which argues that our time would be better spend enhancing and further developing an individuals strengths rather than focusing on fixing their weaknesses.

The argument is that if someone is not naturally good at something, they will at best be mediocre at it. And while you’re spending all of your time fixing things they’re not really all that good at, they don’t take full advantage of their existing strengths. I think there may be something to that. I’m not sure you should ignore all weaknesses, though.

I’d like to open this up for reader discussion. What’s your take: Grow strengths, improve weaknesses, or both?

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This post is Part 2 in the three-part series Building a Better Training Program. Go back to Part 1 or read Part 3.

Image courtesy of Lumaxart

Last week, I discussed how to measure the effectiveness of training programs. Today, I’ll talk about why programs fail and what you can do about it.

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Image courtesy of Tim Brown

Garr Reynolds over at Presentation Zen has a great article today on the power of play at work. Garr’s article gives a rundown on a recent talk by Tim Brown, the CEO of Ideo about how acting like a child can actually help you produce better results at work.

Definitely worth checking out if you have a few minutes today.

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This post is Part 1 in the three-part series Building a Better Training Program. Skip ahead to Part 2 or Part 3.

Image courtesy of foundphotoslj

Of all the HR functions, training professionals may have the hardest time getting a seat at the table. Particularly when an organization is tightening it’s budgets, training is one of the first departments to feel the pain.

Now more than ever, it’s critical for you to prove that what you’re doing is valuable. In this three-part series, I’ll show you how.

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The other day, I wrote an article about how to have better meetings. One thing I didn’t mention in the article, and should have, was my love/hate relationship with MS PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is an incredibly powerful slideshow tool. The problem isn’t the software – it’s that people don’t know how to use it effectively. The typical slideshow is 57 slides of minuscule text with the occasional overly complicated graph or chart thrown in for good measure. Is this really your idea of a good presentation?

Today, I’m going to teach you what I’ve learned about how to give better presentations (and yes, I will explain the title of this article).

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If you want to improve the performance of your organization, one of the best places to start may be with your recruiting process.

Today, I’m going to give you the tools to improve your recruiting and selection process.

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