According to Michael Allen's Guide to E‑Learning, there are 3 priorities for training success:
1. Ensuring learners are highly motivated to learn
2. Guiding learners to appropriate content
3. Providing meaningful, memorable, and motivational learning experiences
I am sure appropriate content and meaningful learning experiences are usually well delivered in most of the corporate trainings.
However, for many years, I don’t see many employees who are highly motivated to learn and enjoy participating in this routine.
Lack of motivation is one of the major reasons of the failure of trainings. They are not motivated as they are not given a foreseeable future of what they could become after doing it.
Here are some suggestions on how to motivate employees in trainings:
1) Make it easier to digest
Employees don’t engage with training usually because they don’t find it easy to absorb. It might be too boring. It might also be too difficult to understand. A well-designed and thoughtful training can surely make employees more likely to engage with the training.
2) Make it related to their work
Many employees are not engaged with the training as they don’t see how the training is useful to them. Try to relate it to real life and show them how it could help them at work by providing different scenarios.
3) Make it fun!
Besides providing nice food, making the training fun is also an essential element to motivate your staff to learn. Try gamification, role play and other interesting interactive approach.