Participants make a determination concerning your professionalism and credibility within seconds of entering the training room. How the room is set up, what you are wearing, how you greet them and the overall environment set the stage for a successful 3 hour, or three-week training. There are a number of ways you can create a professional environment. One of my favorite is Power Point.
I like Power Point. I have to say I am loosing interest in using Power Point with every unit of training, but I do like it as a way to “dress up” a presentation or set the stage for a class. One of my favorite ways to use Power Point is to pique interest in the class before the class gets started or to give participants something to watch or think about while waiting for class. There are a couple of ways you can accomplish this:
- If you use a Power Point in class, randomly select some of the slides and have them running before the class begins. This does not work well with slides full of text, but works great if you have pictures with just a few words that help cover content.
- Use a Power Point with pictures and have them running with music as participants arrive. Diverse pictures of people work well with Cultural Diversity Trainings, pictures of heavy equipment might work well for a safety training, pictures of nature might work well with a presentation concerning recycling. You get the idea.
- Finally, I love quotes and often have a slide show of 90+ quotes on a variety of topics running before class. I like to use humorous quotes as it sets the stage for an interesting and interactive class. However, you can always select topics relevent to the class being facilitated if you want to focus interest before the training begins. It takes a little time to enter quotes on Power Point but you can use this 15_minues_of_quotes Power Point to get started. It is completely editable and can be added to or modified as you need.
Have any additional resources for making a good first impression. That’s right, you need to e-mail me at poortrainer@gmail.com
