8 Things to Think About When Developing a Great Training Exercise

Introduction

We’ve talked about the benefits and concepts of training or mastery exercises. Now let’s talk about the nuts and bolts of designing a training exercise to empower your trainees to return home to apply and synthesize what you’ve taught them.

When you offer training exercises you must determine how much your trainees have absorbed. You must ensure trainees are competent in the stated training objectives once they leave the classroom.

More importantly you want trainees already armed with tools to begin implementing workers’ comp management concepts back home. Therefore your training exercises must replicate real-life because trainees must apply the knowledge have received and synthesize that knowledge to reflect their unique business situation.

Here, we will have trainees create a 3-4 slide presentation demonstrating costs of workers’ comp and benefits of workers’ comp management. Trainees must use injury management tools to convince senior management that establishing a workers’ comp management program will quickly save money.

Your core concept are costs and cost savings. First show senior management what current workers’ comp costs are, then show them how much they will save by doing one thing, such as instituting transitional duty. You want management’s collective eyes to light up.

1. Decide what level of skill mastery you want trainees to demonstrate.
Bloom’s taxonomy lists five measurable levels of mastery and these include: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis.

By creating a small presentation, students will likely demonstrate all of the above. Ultimately they are applying tools it to their business, and analyzing which tools work best, and synthesizing all this into performance goals.

2. Make sure the mastery exercise reflects a measurable learning objective.
It’s not enough to say, “trainees will understand how to create a presentation,” because you cannot observe trainees “understanding.” Write the objective like this:

Trainees will develop a 3-4 slide presentation to show senior management the cost of work-related injuries and the cost benefits of instituting a return-to-work program using the tools they have acquired in class and these include: Sales Required to Pay for Accidents and Transitional Duty Calculator.

Students are then to write 1–3 goal statements summarizing how to use the tools to form the basis of a workers’ comp management going forward.

You can actually see the trainees performing the stated objectives. Their slide presentations will show the level of application, and the goal statements determine how well they’ve synthesized training into their own work situations.

3. Determine the method.
Educators love to call this methodology, but it is really just the method you use to train. Will you group trainees or have them work alone? Will you have class discussion, or have each trainee provide something written?

4. Estimate how many trainees you will have in class.
This determines how you will configure trainees. How many trainees do you anticipate? Based on this number you have them work individually, in pairs, or in groups.

It is good to have trainees work together in mastery exercises because team building is essential since workers’ compensation management is a multi-disciplinary effort. An implicit part of the mastery exercise is determining how well individuals come together and work as a team.

5. Determine the materials you will need.
In this example, we will need empty overhead slides and markers. We don’t want to get hung up on the materials, we want the team to focus on developing a slide presentation based on the concepts they have acquired over the course of training.

Workers’ Compensation Tools:

Sales Required to Pay for Accidents hardcopy grid,(or calculator) to demonstrate costs of workers’ compensation.

Transitional Duty Cost Calculator to show workers’ comp costs and immediate cost savings.

If trainees are not using the website, provide hard copy grids and have trainees perform simplified calculations and plot results on slides.

6. Determine preparation and presentation time.
You want everyone to have the opportunity to develop, present and be constructively critiqued.

7. Write a description of the training exercise and the expected outcome so you can structure the exercise and move trainees forward:
a. Trainees will group in numbers of ___. 3-4 slides and a pack of markers are given to each group.
b. Trainees are instructed to construct a presentation to senior management, remembering, senior management likes their presentations to be brief.
c. Trainees are given 30 minutes to prepare and 1 hour for each presentation. Critique are 5 minutes after each presentation.
d. Trainees are graded on how they use the workers’ comp management tools to show

8. Decide the measurement against which you are going to grade.
Let’s look at the old dependent/independent variable paradigm. The dependent variable stays the same no matter what. These are the tools, slides and markers. Everybody has the same tools.

The independent variable is how well the students use those tools, and the level of mastery and imagination they use to convey, apply, and synthesize the information they’ve been given into a succinct presentation. (workersxzcompxzkit)

You will be amazed and heartened to see the imaginative ways your students will take the tools you’ve given them and create great presentations. Sometimes they are truly creative, often they are funny and everyone has a good laugh. But all the trainees enjoy the exercises and they are truly armed with valuable tools they can use the minute they return to work!

Author Robert Elliott can be reached at [email protected] or 860-553-6604.

TO DOWNLOAD OR LISTEN TO FREE AUDIO PODCAST click here: http://www.workerscompkit.com/gallagher/mp3
By: Anthony Van Gorp, private investigator with 25 years experience.

Do not use this information without independent verification. All state laws vary. You should consult with your insurance broker or agent about workers’ comp issues and purchasing workers’ compensation insurance.

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