Learning something new can be exiting, but for a lot of trainees, it can be stressful, too. They want to perform well and earn high marks, and they want to look more competitive. So, don’t make training harder for them than it needs to be.
Below are three ways you’re stressing out your trainees, even if you’re not intentionally doing it.
1. Giving Timed Tests
Unless your trainees learned how to save a life during their training modules, where a life literally depends on their ability to quickly execute a task, timing your assessments is simply not necessary or effective and will only stress your trainees out. If your training modules are effectively designed, their assessments won’t cover more than one learning objective or have too many topics or extraneous information anyway. So, there’s no need to include tests with over 10 or 15 questions that need to be answered in less than 10 minutes.
Allow your trainees to look up answers and information as they need to during online assessments, too, as it won’t affect their performance in the real world where they’ll always have access to the Internet and your learning management system when they need it. Unless testing their speed is critical, don’t require timed tests.
2. Not Providing Valuable and Timely Feedback
Even though trainees can receive instant scores on assessments and feedback in virtually simulated environments, receiving feedback from their trainers and managers is essential to their learning and development. They need to hear from you what they’re doing well, where they still have room for improvement, and where they can find additional resources to look at. And they need that feedback as soon as possible after completing a course or training module.
Your trainees will get stressed when taking your courses if they never receive feedback from you, as they’ll never know how they’re performing in relation to their day-to-day jobs. They might even stop taking your courses altogether if they never receive timely feedback from you or their managers.
3. Not Offering Detailed and Singular Learning Objectives and Guidelines
If your trainees don’t understand why they’re participating in a course or program or how it’s valuable to their everyday work, they’ll get bored or frustrated throughout the entire course, and they will not be engaged. They’ll also get stressed if you try to cover more than one learning objective in a course. They might get confused or overwhelmed if you try to include way too much information at once.
In addition, if you don’t outline learning objectives and what trainees will be expected to have learned after completing a course, they’ll get frustrated and stressed out when they receive low scores or negative feedback on their performance.
If you don’t want your trainees to be stressed out, avoid doing the things mentioned above.