Training Meeting: Purpose And Definition (+ Helpful Tips)
Training meetings acclimate new hires and new clients with your products. Here’s how to host a great training meeting.
Training meetings are key to every great organization in more than just one way. Internally, they can help new hires learn their roles to a tee or help integrate a new software or procedure to your department. For clients and others outside your organization, training meetings ensure they can get the most out of your product or service.
No matter who the training meeting is for, read on to learn all about training meetings – what they are, what they do, and tips for running effective ones.
- What is a training meeting?
- What is the purpose of a training meeting?
- Examples of a training meeting
- 7 tips on how to hold a training meeting
What is a training meeting?
A training meeting is when a person – whether a manager, supervisor, or another team member – transfers knowledge and skills to another person or group. These sessions can improve employee performance, offer new perspectives, and ensure that people use a product correctly. Training meetings are typically for employees but can also be for clients or customers, depending on who needs training.
Run delightful training meetings
Increase meeting engagement and productivity with a collaborative agenda that the whole team can contribute to. Try using a tool like Fellow!
What is the purpose of a training meeting?
Training sessions are important because they can teach new concepts to team members – including managers and leaders – and customers. They provide folks with the tools they need to ensure they’re conducting a process or using a new platform correctly, while taking advantage of all its features, benefits, and nuances that make work easier.
Training meetings allow people to share their knowledge and skills with others so they can thrive at work while bringing your organization more success. For example, a new hire doesn’t just walk in on their first day and automatically know what they’re supposed to do. They’ll need a few training meetings to learn their role and the software the company uses so they can do their job successfully.
Examples of a training meeting
Here are a few examples of common training meetings.
1Onboarding training
Onboarding training helps new hires learn the ropes of their new position. During their training sessions, your new hires will learn new skills and gain new knowledge so they can do their best work. A manager, training department, or your HR team will typically host these training sessions.
2Safety training
Safety training is necessary for all organizations, not just teams that work with hazardous materials. That’s because workplace safety is as much about big-time dangers as about that long extension cord that’s a big tripping hazard in the hallway. A great safety training meeting teaches team members to spot risks within a workplace and its facilities and follow rules that lessen the risk of injuries. It also happens regularly – say, every year or six months – so you can be sure your team is playing it safe.
3Seminars and guest speakers
Hiring skilled team members is only half the battle. The other half is teaching everyone even more through people highly experienced in your industry. This is where guest speakers and seminars can help. A guest speaker can motivate your team with new ideas and perspectives that they might not have thought of before.
4Client training on a new product
Although training meetings typically refer to team members, they can also pertain to clients and customers. In fact, trained customers are more likely to stay with your organization long-term and bring in new customers. According to Thought Industries, trained customers renew at a 92% rate. That’s because when you train your customers, they engage more with your product and get more value out of it, which makes them more likely to stay or even expand when it comes time to renew.
7 tips on how to hold a training meeting
Try out these helpful tips for an effective training session.
- Practice your presentation
- Cater to all learning styles
- Know who’s in your audience
- Add a personal touch
- Make the training collaborative
- Put yourself into trainees’ shoes
- Ask for feedback
1Practice your presentation
When you present to your team, you want to sound enthusiastic about your topic so everyone will want to listen. After all, if you’re not excited about what you’re going to present, chances are your audience won’t be either. So before you present, try out a few practice rounds to focus on your verbal and nonverbal cues. Your tone and body language are among the biggest indicators of how you really feel, so do your best to radiate positivity.
2Cater to all learning styles
When training a team member, what might work for you might not for them. That’s why, in training, it’s important to remember that everyone learns and processes information in a different way. For example, you might be a visual learner who best understands concepts when you see them. However, your trainee may be a physical learner who learns better by actually doing something instead of just watching.
There are seven different learning styles: visual, auditory, verbal, physical, logical, social, and solitary. Ideally, you want to try to incorporate as many learning styles as you can into your training. A combination of linguistic applications, hands-on experience, and visuals can help everyone leave the meeting ready to work wonders in their roles.
3Know who’s in your audience
It’s important to really know who’s in your audience before your training session so you can cater more to their needs. A few things you may want to ask beforehand may include their familiarity with the topic, their work style, and their learning style. This information will help you know how to design your meeting and figure out what topics you should cover – and how you’ll cover them.
4Add a personal touch
To capture your audience’s attention, you should make your training sessions relevant to your team’s everyday lives. Ideally, you want to relate your training to your team’s goals and objectives. If you can build that bridge, your audience is more likely to pay attention and participate throughout your training meeting.
5Make the training collaborative
Rather than listening to a manager or director lecture, most people get more out of their training when they’re involved. When you’re training, ask questions and have your audience contribute to ideas to make them feel included. After all, team conversations build team collaboration.
6Put yourself into trainees’ shoes
When you host your training sessions, it’s important to put yourself into your audience’s shoes. Will your topic interest them? Will it relate to their work? How can you make a boring but important topic as exciting as a delightful lunch meeting? Will you wind up talking non-stop for an hour or leave space for questions and comments? These simple details can make a world of a difference in how well your audience engages with you and remembers what you’ve said.
7Ask for feedback
After your training session, send an email or survey to your audience asking for peer feedback. You can ask about anything from your presentation skills to how meaningful the group found your training. This way, you can gauge whether your audience learned anything from your presentation – and how you can improve your next training meeting.
Plan your training meeting with Fellow
Training meetings can help you build a successful, driven team. To plan an effective meeting, you’ll want a tool that helps you organize your ideas and build a thorough meeting agenda with your team’s help. With Fellow, you can do all that while recording meeting notes and exchanging feedback. Productive training sessions have never been this easy.
