Knowing Your Audience

Today was the last scheduled Summation training class for this batch of training, and it proved to be one of the most interesting.

Breaking the training up into hour long segments, each focusing on an individual part of the Summation tool, was definitely the right way to go. Instead of trying to cram things into a shorter time, or putting more information into one training session than anyone was going to remember, this allowed me to go in depth into a specific area for a full hour, then give the attendees a week to digest that before getting into the next hour’s worth of training.

Of course, the other thing it allowed people to do was pick and choose which areas they wanted to know more about, as well, as opposed to committing to all 4 weeks. That was the case with my students today. As luck would have it, yesterday the class was all folks who are really brand new to using Summation, and I had to spend quite a bit of time covering some very basic things when it comes to using the tagging features. That was ok, because really, even with the extra time to cover the basics, we finished in under an hour.

Today, my luck stayed good. All of the students today were folks who would not need to go over those very basic things, and, quite coincidentally, they were also folks who wanted to learn more about working with transcripts but had conflicts that caused them to miss last week’s session over that topic.

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? Naturally, we managed to cover both sessions in the hour allotted for today. Because I knew these folks, and I knew what areas I could breeze through quickly with them, we were able to cover both class outlines, and even have some spare time to answer some random questions for them. It was a great lesson in being able to adapt your training to your audience so that they get the most out of it. (At least I think they got a lot out of it, they could just be lying to me…)

It also occurs to me that the next step in training is not just breaking the sessions down into different specific areas of the program, but also breaking it down by the audience. I had originally planned to cover the same material in both sessions this week, but wound up covering something quite a bit different because of the different audiences of each class. It might be good to keep it somewhat segregated by experience level in the future. At least it’s worth considering.

Follow these topics: LitigationSupport, Personal