30th Annual Creative Training Techniques^® Conference

In this interactive and energetic presentation, Ann will share secrets from her years of research on learning and the brain to spark those learning moments we all strive for in today’s noisy world. You will get actionable techniques to maximize stickiness, boost retention, and make new insights part of day-to-day activities for all your diverse learners.

Are you more focused on content or connection? Content is essential, but we know that relationships precede learning! In other words, our participants need to have a relationship with the instructor, fellow learners, or the content before they can learn. In this session, we will explore strategies you can use to create a culture of trust, belonging, and psychological safety so that learners can be in an open state for learning.

A common question Bob Pike Group trainers get asked is, “How do you bring reluctant or resistant learners on board?” Participants who won’t engage or who regularly challenge a trainer can be a serious distraction to those who are there to learn. In this session, we’ll explore several presentations of resistant learners and uncover the truth about what works – and what doesn’t – to bring these participants around. Hint: emotional safety and power of the group are keys!

Michael cooking his foot in a Foreman grill. Kevin spilling his famous chili. And pretty much every second of the Dinner Party episode. What can these classic Office moments (and many more) teach us about training? In this session, various scenes from The Office will show you how to become a Dundie award-winning trainer, even if you’re not a fan of the show. Together, we’ll see how trainers can learn from mistakes characters make in the Dunder Mifflin conference room and beyond, and apply the show’s secret wisdom that could earn you a promotion to Assistant to the Regional Trainer.

In today’s environment, teams are the engine that fuels how work gets done. But how do you get the best performance and power of the team’s collective intelligence? Fostering psychological safety, promoting inclusion, encouraging collaborative problem-solving, and cultivating a learning mindset will increase team performance and foster a positive work environment where team members thrive and contribute their best. Building high-performance teams is an ongoing process. You only get the benefits of the team’s collective intelligence when you intentionally design development that engages everyone’s best thinking while providing the right tools in the flow of work. You will leave with practical ideas to enhance the nurturing of high-performing teams that you can replicate in your organization.

Dive into the art and science of creating effective job aids. From understanding user needs to designing effective guides, participants will gain practical skills to develop job aids that enhance workplace performance and streamline tasks. By the end of this session, you will: identify user contexts to tailor job aids to specific tasks; examine job aid formats and design principles; and develop action plans for successful job aid deployment.

Buffet style lunch included—feast on Minnesota comfort foods and healthy options together or on your own.

So much content, and so little time. That’s a problem trainers face when SMEs think all content is need-to-know. Learn to simplify content, navigate the conversation when you can’t include everything, and create knife-sharp learning objectives by starting with the end in mind.

If they are not playing, they are straying, so it is important to find the ‘ying and yang’ relationship between the content and supporting activities. Remember, games are not the antithesis of content. Rather, they help challenge, reinforce, persuade, refocus, and reassure participants. This session provides 13 fun and engaging activities that can be used to support learning transfer.

Every webinar benefits from a producer. But what’s a trainer to do when that’s not possible? Being a solo trainer who also produces requires creativity and resourcefulness to keep participants engaged. Here are some ideas to help you manage both roles effectively. Join this session for a how-to dive on pre-training preparation, in-session engagement, and managing the dual role.

Instructional design underpins the success of any training and assessment program. It involves deliberate choices about what, when, where and how to deliver training to support students in the acquisition of learning. This session examines the basics of instructional design, including common design models and methodologies, key principles for designing outcomes-driven and engaging learning, and the specific processes needed to ensure the quality of instruction. It will also provide practical tips to help participants get started and setup for success.

How many times have you led, participated, or observed a session and the same one or two people speak up for everything? Or a session where people did not pay attention to contribute meaningfully? How do you deal with these scenarios? Dive deep into tactics to harness and redirect your participants in virtual and in-person settings while keeping your cool.

Most trainers don’t open, they start dumping content. They don’t close, they just run out of time. Discover the C.O.R.E. ingredients (Closers, Openers, Revisit, Energize) to design and deliver training that increases retention 90% over traditional lecture and PowerPoint. You will leave this session with concrete strategies to make your training 100% participant-centered—the key to long-term memory and pull-through on the job.

The behavior of a few can have an enormous impact on the wider group and as a result can critically injure the success of your programs. But wouldn’t it be great to have some sort of trainer’s first aid kit of items to get your sessions out of intensive care! This session will discuss 11 creative, proven strategies aimed at minimizing difficult behaviours experienced during face-to-face training.

If you give your learners choices, they’ll feel in control, included, and be more open to your teaching content. And you can accomplish all that through polling! Explore how polls create landslides of learner engagement and retention. Identify erroneous polling practices every trainer needs to veto. And experience polling strategies that add variety to your training and application.

Questions are critical to the way learners engage with your content. When questions are framed well, they prime the brain to know what’s important, inform the trainer what learners need, and increase retention through interaction. So many trainers ask questions without forethought and strategy. Empower yourself to become a better question-asker. In this session, you will discover myths and truths around questions, examine elements of effective questions, and explore questioning strategies to engage your learners.

We live and learn in stories. Stories are powerful teachers and motivators, reaching learners on a level that few lectures can match. There are many ways we can leverage the power of stories in training – from recounting our own personal or professional experiences, to sharing clips of videos, to drafting relevant tales to demonstrate important points. In this session we’ll dive into the impact of good storytelling on learning and retention and explore ways you can leverage this powerful approach to create training that’s unforgettable.

Join The Bob Pike Group team for an informal time to mix and mingle with other conference attendees and presenters.

Start the morning with an extra dose of self-care in the form of sunrise yoga. Flexibility, balance, and intention are important in training and on the yoga mat. This non-traditional yoga class will provide a comfortable place to move into the uncomfortable space of stretching, balance, and being present. Bring your yoga mat (or a towel from your room) and join other conference goers for 45 minutes of “you time.”

Got a PPT file for an existing (in-person or virtual) presentation? Want to discover how to quickly transform it into a highly interactive webinar slide deck? Come ready with a file-sharing link, and you could be selected as one of the attendees to win a FREE webinar PPT makeover from Collin on the spot! Even if your slide deck isn’t picked, everyone who attends will experience an interactive behind-the-scenes look at a streamlined webinar slide-design process! Takeaway secrets to turn stale slides into interactive works of art and FREE slide templates.

What does your learner’s pathway to successfully learning and applying new skills and knowledge look like? What might be getting in the way of their application of learning? Discover more than just gaps in knowledge to ensure you are setting your learners up for success.

Shine a light on the key concepts of unconscious bias and how to recognize when it is happening within and around you. This session will challenge you to become more inclusive of others’ perspectives, explore 5 steps to identify and address unconscious bias, and discuss how these concepts influence ADDIE.

Delivering webinars on MS Teams can be intimidating. If you haven’t gone beyond chat, open mic, and annotation tools for interaction on this platform, this session will be an eye opener. Experience breakout rooms, quizzes and survey, and breakout room that aren’t awkward. Gain exposure to accessibility tools like whiteboard with live transcription and immersive reader. Organize course content with channels, wiki, file-sharing and co-authoring. And explore third party apps like Mentimeter and Nearpod for additional activities and content creation tools.

One of the most common challenges for trainers is getting the group to refocus and return to their seats after an activity. This is particularly true if it is a noisy activity or one which ends in much laughter. Similarly, a lot of time can be lost to the trainer when their group does not return in a timely fashion after a break. Unless the trainer is keen on going hoarse by repeatedly calling them back, they need some other weapons in the armory to facilitate success. This session provides seven simple strategies for getting participants back on time and helping the trainer to use that time saved for more meaningful learning!

Mandated meetings often make employees feel (and act) like prisoners. How do you win them over, deliver your important content, and see the knowledge transfer back to the job? It’s easier than you think to engage people who don’t have say-so about being in the room. Explore fun, free tactics to decrease tension, honor experience, give away power, engineer curiosity, and harness positive peer pressure. This is a can’t miss session for people tasked with onboarding, compliance, safety and required training. Your participants thank you in advance!

Do you sometimes struggle with thinking creatively to design training material? A major misconception about creativity is either you’re a creative person, or you’re not. Creativity is a muscle that can grow and develop under the right conditions. There are surprising and simple steps one can take to improve their ability to think creatively. In this session, we will unpack practical techniques you can use to unleash your creative training superpowers to captivate learners like never before!

Just as instructor-centered training sucks the energy out of the room, participant-centered training has potential to infuse energy into organizational culture. When we create an engaging experience, we promote connectivity and foster psychological safety for all attendees. See how you can help participants connect on a personal level with teambuilding activities and authentic conversation, while gaining buy-in for in-person training.

Discussions help learners to explore content in their own words, reflect upon other people’s viewpoints, and strengthen ideas. Discussions also give participants a chance to receive a ‘best from the rest’ perspective about the subject matter. However, validating everyone’s comments while keeping productive can be challenging. This session provides 6 strategies to keep discussions meaningful and timely.

You might be a brilliant rocket scientist working for NASA, but if you can’t work with others in the rocket ship, you’ll never go to the moon! Expertise alone is not enough to ensure professional success—soft skills training is as important as technical skills training. Employees with a solid grip on soft skills are team-oriented, self-confident, adaptable, and quick on their feet to solve problems. Experience activities in this session you can use to teach soft skills.

Whether you’re face to face or online, bursts of video can enhance training sessions. Just like kids sometimes hear it better from someone else than their parents, participants snap back into focus when video illustrates your content. Sound intimidating? Have no fear—Becky will share four fun ways you can add video to your programs even if you’re not a techie. Your sessions will have a new dimension when you make video work for you!

Whether you inherited a slide deck, received a mandatory deck, or simply don’t have time to create new slides, explore 17 ways to change the delivery without recreating the deck itself. In this session you will experience a varied approach to increase engagement without the reliance on slides and identify ways to present your points with power, not just PowerPoint.

We’ve all been there, our learners possess the needed knowledge and skills for behavioral change, yet they lack the motivation to apply them. This session will delve into strategies for shifting attitudes to inspire motivation and, consequently, behavioral change.

Identify factors influencing learner motivation and analyze how attitudes impact behavioral change back on the job.

Sometimes learners need some respite from the content and a well-placed energiser can help to boost their connection to the training, refocus their attention or simply refresh them so they are ready for the next topic. This session reveals the five secrets of effective interactive training, that is faster, cheaper, and better. During the session, attendees will rapidly explore and participate in more than a dozen 60 second energisers, that will help them to get the most out of the energy of their groups. These activities will be suitable for delivering training in both a face-to-face setting, as well as within an online learning space.

If you geek out on trying tech tools, look no further. In this session, explore virtual field trips for industry-specific experience with VR simulation. Discuss easy to add mobility features to make your online classes more inclusive. Gain exposure to tools for AI, collaborative platforms, live streaming and recording, microlearning and analytics. Remember, the key to technology is to complement your training style and enhance the learning outcomes, not replace human interaction. Stay updated on emerging technologies and explore innovative ways to integrate them into your virtual training.

As reported by Deloitte, the number one trend in organizations is changing the way people learn. Why is learning trending on top? Because 86% of respondents ranked it ahead of teamwork, leadership, and talent mobility! What are you doing to change the way people learn inside your organization? This session will explore how to harness presentation techniques to increase engagement and upskill talent.

One of the strategies we use at The Bob Pike Group is to move quickly through material (no longer than 20 minutes per content chunk!) and revisit. Moving quickly helps keep learners engaged, while pre-visiting (or teasing) and revisiting previously covered material helps ensure the important content sticks. In this breakout, discover several techniques for revisiting content in ways that ensures maximum fun for maximum engagement!

This session looks at the implementation phase of creative training. This will include the provision of handy tips on how to set your learning space up for success, to help you to get the most out of the techniques you have planned for. It will also include ideas for managing timing, encouraging collaboration, building networking opportunities, and debriefing learning activities. Finally, it will provide some quick, yet effective evaluation methods that can be used to round out your session.

Ever notice how some presenters are as smooth as silk while others are … not? Training is not just about conveying buckets of knowledge. It’s most effective when we link points together and communicate ideas clearly and concisely. Signaling or transitioning with words, phrases, or activities helps our audience understand the flow of the presentation.

When the boss says jump! do you say, how high? Even better is to position yourself as a strategic partner in training by taking a consultative approach to the requests you field. In this session, discover a 4-step process to tackle the right problems and prescribe the best solutions. Performance consulting will help you get your ideas implemented, even when you don’t have autonomy.

This session highlights how we can improve the impact we have on our learners. Explore five key facets of impact, which overlap every role within learning and development. During this session, you will identify the ABCs of attitude, describe the five facets of impact, explore the influence of cognitive bias, emotional contagion, and mutual reciprocity on success.

It can take hours, days, weeks, months of labor to develop a quality training product. But the future of design is bright with new AI tools! In this session, learn how to leverage this emerging technology to streamline your design process. This session will discuss what AI technology exists and how it can help designers speed their process. We’ll look at the tools and techniques of incorporating this important technology into our workflow, as well as some of the limitations of AI.

Ever find yourself in a technical training and wish it didn’t feel so…technical? Seems like the moment your employees become comfortable with a new system or technology another one comes along. This ever evolving (but often improving) access to new software can be good for business but frustrating for employees. It’s vital for trainers to craft a successful digital learning strategy with steps that ensure effective knowledge transfer.

If we want learners to be more than little boxes on a screen, we must do things differently. Give them a little motivation to engage and it’s a completely different experience. During this session, explore how music can set the tone, add elements of fun no matter the content, gamify your lesson, retain more through polling, and engage body and mind through movement.

The biggest determiner of feedback's effectiveness isn't the giver but the receiver. Despite this, most organizations channel their energy into perfecting the art of giving feedback. While giving feedback is vital, successful trainers understand that real growth lies in the skill of receiving feedback and using it to get better. In this course, you'll discover techniques to improve your ability to receive feedback to experience more 'lightbulb' moments as a trainer.

If you’re looking for training tips, you came to the right place. But maybe not be the place you expected. Join Collin as he uncovers hidden training wisdom from Elvis’ endless anthology of hits. And if you’re a suspicious mind who’s skeptical about the power of interaction… and the idea of minimizing lecture has you all shook up… that’s all right. Collin won’t be cruel. But if you want engaged learners… it’s now or never!