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.

The Five Stages of Change

Where did our trainer go wrong? She failed to consider the needs of her audience. She spent the first 45 minutes of the seminar trying to convince people that they needed a great onboarding program, but they were already there. What the audience really needed was some practical advice on how build one.

Understanding where in the five stages of change your audience is (or failing to do so) can make or break your training program. Spend too much time getting buy-in when people are already keen on the idea, and your audience will get bored. Jump right into the nitty-gritty before people have warmed up to what you’re selling and all of your great how-to tips will be useless.

One of the easiest ways to prepare for an audience is to use the “Five Stages of Change” model.

1) Pre-Contemplation: Haven’t even thought about it

Your audience is going about their business, doing what they’ve always done. They haven’t even considered doing things differently. If you’re introducing a new system or program at your organization, this is probably where your audience is.

In pre-contemplation, its important to thoroughly explain what the new system or program is, and then try to gain buy-in. Depending on the length of the training, the more detailed how-to information might not be appropriate at this time.

2) Contemplation: Thinking about it, but not making any changes just yet

In this stage, your audience is evaluating the pros and cons of doing things differently. If this is where your audience is, your primary goal should be to gain buy-in for the new way of doing things. It’s essential for you to eliminate any perceived negative impacts caused by the change and ease people’s fears before you start focusing on the good stuff.

As the audience moves through the contemplation stage, a decision to take action will occur (assuming they don’t decide they’re better off doing things the way they’ve always done them).

3) Preparation: Getting ready

During the preparation phase, your audience is gathering information and developing an action plan. If you were holding a how-to seminar like the trainer in our example above, this is the stage you should typically assume that your audience is in. Don’t waste too much time trying to gain buy-in or you’ll lose their engagement pretty quickly.

Focus on specific tactical information, and when appropriate, some of the theory behind the how-to stuff so that they can modify it for their own needs.

4) Action: Git ‘r done!

During the action stage, individuals are actively working to change their behaviors, implement new programs and adopt new systems. If your organization has implemented a new program or system, it’s essential that you reinforce the behaviors you’re looking for through ongoing feedback loops – through managers, blogs, newsletters, social networks and any other channels of communication you have – to ensure people don’t go back to the old way of doing things.

5) Maintenance: Coming full circle

This stage of the model is a bit odd, in that’s essentially the pre-contemplation stage for the new behavior. Individual’s in the maintenance stage have completely adopted the new program, system, behavior or what have you, and this is now their default auto-pilot mode.

Ongoing Reinforcement

At any stage in this model (except for pre-contemplation and maintenance), individuals can revert back to pre-contemplation. It’s really important for you to constantly promote the changes and motivate employees to adopt them. That’s obviously easier done when dealing with employees in your organization. For outsider trainers who run how-to seminars, this may not be as feasible, but handouts and FAQs that can address concerns people may raise after the training can help ensure your suggestions are adopted.

Have you ever sat through a training where it was clear the trainer didn’t understand the audience? Or maybe you’ve been on the other side of the table and known that your audience just wasn’t into it? Share your experiences below.