As a business owner, you understand the importance of effectively onboarding and training your employees. After all, your employees are the heart of your business. With the right skill set and knowledge, your employees will be able to actively contribute to your organization’s growth, allowing you to achieve your goals and create a more satisfying employee experience.
This is where knowing how to craft compelling training presentations is key. Whether you’re preparing new hires to tackle their responsibilities or updating existing employees on new procedures, well-designed training presentations can help streamline the process and ensure everyone is on the same page.
However, a training presentation isn’t as simple as a few bullet points on a slide; you’ll need to convey information about your business in an engaging way that grabs your audience’s attention and ensures your insights resonate with them. Use these top tips to develop compelling training presentations at your business:
- Understand your audience
- Use engaging visuals
- Incorporate storytelling
Setting your employees up for success begins with preparing the right training materials. Let’s dive in!
Understand your audience
Before you jump into getting your presentation ready, take the time to understand your audience. Are you onboarding employees with previous experience in the field or fresh college recruits? Will you be training existing employees transitioning into a new role? Or, perhaps you’re updating your employees on new business procedures.
When crafting your presentation, it’s essential to keep your target audience in mind, as this will inform how much background knowledge your audience already has or if they’ll need a more detailed overview of the subject matter.
Let’s consider the example of a dance studio onboarding new teachers at their business. The dance studio will need to ensure that the new staff has the foundational knowledge of their business operations, so it would be helpful in their training presentation to cover the studio’s history, mission, and values on top of the day-to-day operations.
DanceStudio-Pro’s guide for dance studio owners also recommends going over the tools your business uses to streamline operations, so new employees can easily tackle their responsibilities. For instance, the business in our example may use dance studio software with teacher management features, so their training presentation must cover how to leverage the software for success.
Keeping your audience and purpose in mind as you design your training presentation will ensure that you include the most relevant information on your slides.
Use engaging visuals
If you’re displaying a slideshow with a lot of words and little to no images, it’s highly likely that you’ll lose your audience’s attention. A mix of visuals can help to break up content and explain difficult concepts, ensuring that your employees leave with a solid understanding of the presentation material. Plus, the right visuals will make your presentation more engaging.
Consider adding the following elements to your training presentation:
- Graphic designs. Designs, like theming and illustrations, can create a more visually appealing presentation. Kwala also advises incorporating infographics, charts, and graphs to break down complex information or data and make it more understandable for your employees. For example, if your business wants to cover your projected revenue growth, mapping this out on a model would be easier to grasp than writing out your plans in lengthy sentences.
- Branded elements. Branding your presentation is a great way to immerse employees in your business’s visual identity. Add in your branded elements, such as your color scheme, typography, and logo, so your presentation aligns with your other materials.
- Videos help illuminate your content, break up long presentations, and explain difficult processes to explain in words alone. Continuing with our dance studio example, a studio owner might want to explain their dance recital ticketing strategy to new employees. One of the best ways to highlight this concept is by producing a video covering how to use dance recital software for marketing the upcoming event, selling tickets, and scanning tickets upon entry.
- Photos of your business’s staff and clients can help humanize your organization and allow your new employees to understand better the people they will be working with. For example, if you’re discussing your core value of teamwork, enhance the slide with a photo of your employees working together.
Your visuals should be accessible to people of all abilities, so provide a verbal or written description of these elements when going through your slides. You should also ensure that your images are reasonably sized and have high contrast from the background so they’re easily visible.
Incorporate storytelling
If you’re simply reciting talking points and moving quickly through your slides, employees will be less likely to remember the core information from your presentation. This is where storytelling becomes essential. By sharing stories and real-life examples, you can bring your concepts to life and help your employees understand why the information you’re sharing is valuable.
Continuing with our earlier example, let’s say you’re a dance studio owner explaining the importance of creating accessible choreography. Rather than quickly listing off accessibility best practices, begin with an example of a dance student who benefited from your inclusive teaching style. For instance, you might explain how a visually impaired student named Michelle was able to learn a new dance through her teacher’s verbal descriptions of each dance movement and physical guidance.
This helps employees form an emotional connection with your content and sheds light on the lessons you’re teaching. Even if you’re covering a concept as basic as the right way to create and distribute forms at your business, try to introduce a real-world example that will help your key points stick in your audience’s minds.
In order for your business to succeed, you need to give your employees the foundational skills and knowledge to flourish in their roles. Informative and visually appealing training presentations can help you motivate employees to put best practices into action. To drive knowledge retention, close your presentations with summary slides covering the highlights so you can reinforce your messaging and ensure employees leave with a full understanding.
