What’s the first thing your training people look at when reviewing a training program? My guess is that they look at the presentation. They check to see if it follows a standard template with standard colors. They’ll look for brand compliance. They’ll watch for consistency in capitalization, use of titles, and placement of graphics. They’ll probably even pull out the old rule book on font size and number of words per slide. From that review, they will give you an assessment of the training program. 

But, they are missing quite a bit. What about the applicability and prioritization of the course outcomes? Why isn’t anyone questioning the quality or relevance of the stories and examples? How about interaction design? Why isn’t anyone asking whether the activities are related to the common mistakes people are making? Or, why aren’t people questioning whether the activity itself is too complicated for the audience even to make sense of? Why isn’t anyone concerned about the overall flow of the experience? 

While good presentation design is important, the presentation itself should be a relatively minor component of any good training program. Training should be about interactions and discussions. It should be about making decisions and challenging assumptions and then seeing how those decisions play out. It should be about engaging people’s minds, not just their eyes. The presentation should support the training experience; it should not be the training experience. 

I recently had a situation where one of my courses was being converted to an on-line format. The designers had all sorts of comments about my “slides”. At one point, I raised a concern that one of the activities might not work because it required the users to collaborate virtually. I asked how good the virtual environment’s collaboration tools were and how competent the users were in navigating that environment. The designers assured me that there would no problem and went back to making suggestions on how to improve the slides. When the workshop rolled out, the participants struggled through the first activity. The on-line collaboration tools weren’t suited to the way the activity was designed and the users struggled to make them work. It was a bust. The designers, while well versed in presentation templates, seemed to have little understanding of their virtual environment, its tools, and their users’ abilities to navigate that environment. 

I suspect that the focus on presentations as opposed to learning interactions stems from two issues: 1) Training itself has devolved into presentation of facts and information, and 2) Many organizations use instructors who are not content experts. 

There are number of reasons that training has shifted from being about meaningful interactions to presentations of information and facts. One of the main causes seems to be the pressure to turn everything around fast and the need to move to less robust delivery platforms (on-line, mobile). Unfortunately, in those environments, it’s easier and faster to provide data/fact dumps than true training experiences.  Instead of rising to the challenge of meeting these new constraints with new approaches, many designers have simply accepted that training (and therefore the presentations used in training) is about disseminating information. 

I once had a designer tell me that I had to remove a slide from one of my presentations because it had too much information on it. I said, “but it is an example of a slide with too much information on it.” I tried to explain that the slide wasn’t a content slide and that I wasn’t trying to “teach” the information on it. He wouldn’t budge. He told me that their guidelines said I couldn’t show a slide with that much text. I see this a lot. Instructional designers are so conditioned to use slides to present content, they (and their standards/guidelines) aren’t able to adapt to more traditional uses of slides (such as examples or highlights) which often require a different set of guidelines). 

Another problem that fuels the “presentation as training” mentality is that many organizations use instructors who are not content experts.  This is a tough challenge for many organizations. Most would agree that having an expert teach their courses would be ideal. However, as companies look for ways to cut costs, it’s much more attractive (e.g., less expensive) to have a course taught by a cadre “instructors” who have a general understanding of the content than it is to pay a premium for an expert. 

This is an understandable trade-off. However, it further perpetuates the problem of presentations becoming data/information dumps rather than support aides for the instructor. When instructors don’t know the content well enough, the slides in the presentation are built as much (or more) for them as they are for the audience. Slides have to list key points, facts, and other pieces of content to remind the instructors what to say. In those cases, the presentation no longer supports the training, it becomes the training. How often have you been in a presentation where the instructor simply read from the slides? If that’s the case, you might as well just hand out the slides and let people read them on their own. That saves everyone time and money. 

There is no doubt that the world is changing fast.  Training departments have to become more nimble and adaptive in order to support the people they serve. However, that should not come at the cost of quality learning. Instructional designers need to step back and re-take their profession. Just as interaction designers or human factors engineers, instructional designers have to become the masters of creating powerful and impactful experiences for their users. Those experience have to extend well beyond the presentation. Otherwise, we will continue to see compliant, consistent presentations that fail to engage users and enable them to learn. 

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Brad Kolar is an executive consultant, speaker, and author. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.