Your company offers you to follow training courses or "imposes" a training course on you... You have decided to take a training course on your own... How can you make the most of your training to develop your competencies and your career in the long term?
1. Assess your needs
You have received the training program. Read it carefully, it's a treasure trove!
Reading the objectives and content will enlighten you on the skills and topics covered. The duration of the training will also indicate the degree of depth of the subject.
Once you have done this, we invite you to ask yourself the following questions:
- What new skills will I acquire? Which ones will I improve on?
- To which of my current missions will these skills contribute? What problems (situations, difficulties) will these skills help me solve?
- To which of my future missions will these skills contribute? How will they help me in my new position?
Finally, ideally, discuss with your manager the most useful themes or objectives of the training, and anticipate the subjects to be applied at the end of the training.
At Luceole, for example, to help you clarify your expectations, we always send you a questionnaire to collect your expectations before our training sessions.
2. Ask yourself the 4 magic questions
The participants who say they have learned the most after a training course are often those who already had the best level when they arrived. Why? A small part of our skills are acquired during our initial training. The rest we develop through experience, with our colleagues, and in training. It is therefore fundamental to always be ready to learn. Those with this mindset create a gap with those who simply seek to reinforce the "I already knew" attitude. Even on topics we are comfortable with, we can still benefit from training.
Generally, we expect training to provide us with knowledge that we did not have. If we are new to a subject, fine. But a training can bring us much more than new knowledge.
In training, at Luceole we guide our experienced participants with these 4 questions:
1. What did I not know?
2. What did I know but not do?
3. What am I already doing, and will do better or more consistently?
4. What will I no longer do?
Thus, a training leads us to revisit our professional practices, to finally implement rules or good practices that we knew but did not apply.
3. Practice, practice, practice
At Luceole, during our training sessions, we make sure to open up a space and time for benevolent experimentation. With the support of the group and the trainer, everyone is called upon to experiment, to push their practices a little further. It's time to take the plunge! There is nothing at stake. We often say that there is more way between 0 and 1 than between 1 and the next. And experimenting with a technique, in a safe training situation, for the first time, means you have come a long way!
So, should you force yourself? In our trainings, you have the right to do or not to do. Often, we find that reluctant participants, after seeing other trainees take action, take the plunge themselves without being pressured. Think of the pride you'll feel once you're over the hump! In the end, it wasn't that hard...
A good trainer will give you time to put into practice and to prepare for the practice.
4. Set your ambitions at the right level
Perhaps you have already experienced a training with an expert, who shares many experiences and dazzles the audience with his or her expertise. We use the term 'audience' deliberately: when the training is used to showcase the expert's skills, it is more like a long lecture than a training session. The risk for the participant is that he or she will leave admiring, but overwhelmed: how far does he or she have to go to reach the expert's level of competence? And where to start?
On the contrary, your trainer is at the service of the group of trainees. Ideally, they share only those elements of their experience that are pedagogically useful. Their expertise is useful in distinguishing the essential from the accessory in learning, guiding you in active training, helping you to solve YOUR problems. This is how we do it at Luceole.
To help you, and we'll tell you again: set your ambitions during training at the right level. You can't become an expert in three days. On the other hand, you do go a long way. Discovering a method, applying it for the first time, becoming aware of it, all of this is to advance on the path of learning. You are learning, don't judge yourself, and don't compare yourself.
5. Take advantage of training you did not ask for
You did not ask for this training and in some cases you do not know why you were enrolled. In addition, you have a lot of work to do, and you are tempted to consider these 2 or 3 days as a waste of time. Yet, what a chance to benefit from a training course!
If possible, ask the person who registered you why you were chosen.
Once you are in training, use the tips below.
- The 4 magic questions will be particularly useful.
- Take the opportunity to take risks in practice, by getting out of your comfort zone.
- What if this was an opportunity to expand your professional network?
- How about preparing a sequence for your next team meeting? It would be useful to share tools learned in training with your colleagues, in the light of your experience.
6. Take advantage of a training course attended by several employees
Are there several people in your organisation taking this course? What a chance! At Luceole, we offer participants from the same company the opportunity to work together, if they wish, on certain tasks or debriefings. We also emphasise the collective dimension of certain subjects. For example, in a training course on writing emails, we can think about a draft charter for using emails in your organisation.
You are now aware of several ways to make the most of the training courses that you are going to follow. Discover our next training sessions. Obviously, each case is different, each company has its own objectives. This is why at Luceole we also help employees and companies to define customised training courses.
Contact us to lay the foundations for your next training course now!
Claire Fromageot
Fondatrice & Dirigeante
Luceole, expert du développement des compétences, vous forme dans ses stages ouverts à tous et accompagne les projets de formation sur-mesure.
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