Hints and Tips for Training and Development
|
|
Choosing a Training and Conference Centre
Course Development Times
Date of Easter
Face-to-Face Ratio (Time Spent Training)
Guidelines for Producing Presentation Slides
Guidelines for Setting Pre-work
Sample Size
Size and Shape of Training Rooms
Training in Foreign Languages and Cultures
Using Consultants
Pre-work Guidelines
- Always make sure that the pre-work is essential to the running of the course
- Give an accurate estimate of how long the pre-work will take
- Prioritise the pre-work tasks
- Let the delegates know why the prework is necessary
- Let them know how the pre-work is to be used
- Let them know when the pre-work will be used
Size and Shape of Training Rooms
- At least 80cm of desk space per person
- Width-to-depth ratio of room should be at least 3:4
- Flip chart to furthest student should be less than 8m
Using Consultants
Whether you use full-time trainers or external consultants depend on the criteria you use (such as cost and flexibility) for making your decision.
Rule of thumb: If the decision is to be made on the basis of cost, consultants start to become more expensive than full-time employees when you employ the same consultants for more than 50 per cent of their time.
Sample Size
One of the problems that face you when you are doing an evaluation exercise using questionnaires is: 'How big a sample do you need for the results to be statistically significant?'
The statistics to do this are quite complicated and you need to know quite a bit about the population already, but if the population is very large and the responses to the questions are fairly well balanced then you can use the following rule of thumb:
Rule of thumb: Sample size = 2500/(percentage error)2
So, if you can accept an error rate of 5 per cent then you will need a sample size of 100 (2500/25).
| 
