2023 Creative Training Techniques^® Conference

Are you working in a Blue or Red Zone? We are working in an age of “Quiet Quitting” and resistance to return to the office. Why? According to meQuilibirum’s 2022 Self-Check Study, employees who work remotely or in a hybrid situation feel more psychologically safe than employee who works on-site full time. Increased emotional intelligence has a cause-and-effect relationship to the psychological safety of our teams. Tackle the role you can play to encourage a psychological safe place (Blue Zone) at work and in the classroom through increasing your emotional intelligence and exploring behaviors that create Learner Safety.

Most trainers START, but incredible trainers OPEN their sessions with purpose. During this interactive session, you will experience 9 simple openers that break preoccupation, allow for networking, and relate to content. Discover how to use mental puzzles, trivia, statistics, and more. And explore how you can easily adapt them to your own content or message.

If you need to change a flat tire, are you more likely to sign up for a course on auto-mechanics or search YouTube for a quick solution? Today short bursts of content rule. In this session, you’ll identify how to incorporate microlearning into new and existing programs. Discover how to create timely and convenient microlearning lessons on your own (it’s easier than you think!) and use video hooks to make content memorable.

Ready for that big presentation? You could spend hours preparing, yet doubts, insecurities and fears can still creep in regardless. But your audience needs your content because it will help set them up for success! Discover a preparation and delivery framework that helps you connect with your audience and leave a lasting impact. And together we’ll practice creating and delivering presentations that resonate and inspire.

Feedback is critical in supporting candidate progress and improvement. However, it is often provided to learners in ways that are geared towards compliance, rather than meaningful performance improvement. Feedback enables online learners to monitor their performance, build confidence and ensure that they are on track for success. This session outlines 12 ways to provide better feedback to support candidates in an online environment. Also discover how you can use technology to support the feedback process, and improve participant performance through effective feedback.

Trainers often wonder if participant-centered approaches are too light-hearted to work with difficult or sensitive content. However, people who work in stressful professions often need the connection and fun that ILPC approaches offer more than anyone! This session will provide examples of real-world application of Creative Training Techniques to sensitive topics and share guidelines and activity ideas for teaching difficult subjects in a participant-centered, creative way that avoids an over-reliance on lecturing.

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

Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate people. This session will provide participants with a “crash-course” in the basics of gamification and will share the 7 steps for creating a dynamic gamification solution to suit any content. Best of all, participants will have the opportunity to put these steps into practice during the session and will walk away with a draft plan to support their own training.

No matter how skilled the trainer, most audiences experience low energy and lack of focus at some point during training. This calls for an energizer, but you don’t want to waste precious instructional time. Learn how to make every energizer you do relevant to your training topic. Experience how the right energizer can pick your class up and get every brain back in the learning zone. Leave this session with reengineered energizers you can use immediately.

Who are your “Raving Fans”? According to Ken Blanchard, a “raving fan” is so overwhelmed and satisfied with the customer service that they’ve received they can’t stop telling others about it. What are others saying about you and the L&D services that you are providing? We can build “raving fans” by building our Social Quotient (SQ) and Adversity Quotient (AQ). Key objectives include tips for building a network of L&D allies, and four steps to recover from adversity.

Learn best practices from fellow participants as well as the instructor for implementing instructor-led/participant-centered training in mandatory and new employee orientation classes. Learn how to deal with the prisoners who attend mandatory training and help them want to be there. A can’t-miss session if you do mandatory or new-hire training of any kind! Discover how to eliminate participant pushback from the get-go.

It's happened to all of us, you run the first session of your new program and it didn't quite go as planned (and you only noticed that spelling error on page 3 now—ugh). Explore a process to refine your training before it hits the classroom for a more seamless implementation.

Imagine a participant-centered training environment where people look forward to learning! Transform boring lectures into interactive opportunities that are participant-centered. By infusing fun into any meeting or training, you improve engagement and increase retention. Your material will be remembered, your approach may be contagious!

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!

There is a difference between presenting, training and facilitating, yet these terms are often used interchangeably. This session will describe facilitation, emphasize its importance, and reveal some of the most important skills and tools of facilitation. Choose from over 25 facilitation tools that can challenge groups, help them build consensus, and unravel conflict. Assess and practice using your facilitation tools.

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. 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.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for…a theme! Did you think there might be a different word? Theme-based learning can be utilized to create a common thread of familiarity for participants and build strong connections with the topics being presented. This approach works well when catering to a diverse learning group who are new to an idea. It provides the grounds to include multiple topics and create a familiar background making the participant at ease with course content. During this session, identify benefits of theme-based learning, organize a theme, and practice theme-based learning on a repeatable template.

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

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.

Say goodbye to puttering and putzing around with PowerPoint. Discover shortcuts to design slides that meet almost any training need. You’ll not only be able to design PowerPoint FAST, you’ll also add a higher degree of polish to your deck when you stick to a repeatable process. Discover how to create perfect slides to open discussions, bring people back from breaks, cut through too much content, and takeaway The Bob Pike Group’s most requested PowerPoint tool!

Clunky. That’s how most webinar setups can feel. If your desk, equipment and screen aren’t configured just right, that can decrease your ease and confidence as a virtual presenter. How can you arrange your screen to make it easier to monitor slide annotations, respond to questions in the chat box, be your own DJ, and make eye contact with the webcam? This workshop will give you smarter webinar setup ideas and gear recommendations for any budget.

Never seem to have enough time to devote to training design? In this session you will explore a simple method to quickly align content and activities to the behaviors necessary to reach your business goals. See for yourself how helpful storyboarding is for designing dynamite content and courses in less time.

Advances in technology, along with the changes to the way we work, have caused us to reassess the skills we need to thrive in the workplace. Experts predict about 50% of all jobs will require upskilling and reskilling when it comes to future-fitting your workforce. Focusing on skills is an important step. That means, there’s a lot of training to be done. Compare the difference between upskilling and reskilling, identify the need for upskilling and reskilling, and create your skills strategy.

Good presenters communicate content; great presenters create an experience and make you hope it never ends. Like yoga, presenting is a practice of continual improvement. Whether you’ve got the “it” factor or you’re still working on it, this session provides ideas to help you stretch and explore ways to shine. Get a boost of confidence and an infusion of calm so you’re ready for the stage, the boardroom, or a virtual meeting.

Music carries with it more than just feelings, it can be a powerful vehicle for information. Research has proven that music affects the body in positive ways: it massages organs, reduces stress and increases learning. This session explores how to harness music in the best way to support learning. It will explain how to use music to evoke emotion, improve timing and lay the platform to build reinforcement. It will also identify how to break pre-occupation by using non-commercial music as well as demonstrate how to simply create your own music using inexpensive software applications.

It’s a common request – We need training! But is that really the first answer? This session will help you evaluate different reasons for poor performance and what solutions can be implemented to address them (training or otherwise).

If we know people prefer to learn differently, then why do so many trainers take the same approach over and over again? It’s normal to train from our comfort zones, but actively engaging our participants requires us to branch out and think creatively about how people love to learn. This session dives into the benefits of using a variety of participant-centered facilitation methods and demonstrates just how beneficial a multi-faceted approach to content delivery can be.

Formative assessments provide feedback to the learner without feeling like a test. Join this session to engage in several formative assessments that are easy to replicate and see just how fun assessment can be! Make assessments fun for everyone—and work for you!

In an environment of nonstop meetings, there are few tools as indispensable as the icebreaker. If you’ve tried to run meetings with Zoom, Google Meet, or other video conferencing software, you’ve probably noticed screens can impose a distance that is challenging to overcome. When participants don’t feel engaged, meetings are less productive. But when you deploy the right icebreaker at the start of your virtual or F2F meeting, you help participants get mentally in the room, connect with one another, focus on a common goal, and get energized to contribute.  

Have you always dreamed of being able to go beyond drawing stick figures? Practice the basics of cartooning to create simple graphics for flipcharts. Leave the session with a ready-to-use poster for your next training. No artistic talent required!

In this dynamic and interactive session, Marc will examine current brain science about learning and retention and provide a variety of research-tested activities and techniques for practitioners to improve participant success. The session will also highlight anchoring techniques and examine the use of props to reinforce a message and enhance the recall of content.

Feedback impacts learning more than any other instructional strategy, according to leading educational expert, Douglas Reeves. While receiving feedback is both an art and a science, it’s a skill that can be learned. In this session you will identify essential elements of effective feedback, examine complications, and discover strategies to receive productive feedback. You’ll leave with more clarity on ways to seek and receive feedback more effectively and be empowered to continue growing as a trainer.

Stories have the power to captivate and inspire your learners. They can help illustrate a problem your audience is experiencing. Allow your audience to learn from the mistakes and wins of the characters. Disprove common objections your audience might have regarding your content. Motivate your audience to take specific application steps. Help them imagine a better future. And more. But what do all masterful storytellers have in common? This workshop will show you!

There is a misconception that we are not serious about learning if we are having fun. On the contrary, we can be very serious about our profession, the art of our instruction, the wellbeing of our participants and even the importance of our subject matter and still create a sense of fun and wonder in our training. In fact, bringing levity to our delivery can often help to relax our students, reduce their anxiety, and create more memorable learning experiences. This session examines the relationship between fun and learning engagement. It will provide specific research, examples, templates and techniques that can be used immediately by participants to enhance engagement and retention.

Have you ever considered yourself to be a sales rep? You are! Selling a product/content takes more than reading scripted lines. If we are enthusiastic about the content, attentive to our participants needs, and confident in the material, your participants will be too. During this session, explore the benefits of selling your training, identify tactics and make your action plan to get learners and leaders all-in with the program.

Many times, learners roll their eyes at mandatory refresher training. And that’s because “refresher” training usually looks exactly like the initial training. In this session, you will explore why that method doesn’t work and what to do instead. Then watch your refresher training go from a mandated drag to an anticipated event.

What’s the point of training? To get results! This session explores Level 4 of Kirkpatrick’s Model, the industry standard for determining the impact of training programs. We all know our training programs should be making a difference at the bottom line for our organizations. But do they? How would we know? We’ll talk about common Level 4 metrics organizations can use to track the impact of their training initiatives, why you should design with Level 4 in mind, when in the process to start thinking about it, and how participant-centered design can get you the results you need.

Whether you a looking to create more dynamic presentations or improve the look and feel of your courseware, digital resources play an important role in organizing content, capturing attention, and supporting your message. This session will explore where to source and how to use a variety of digital resources including icons, images, fonts, stock video and music. It will also curate online options to edit these resources to create exciting and engaging training options.

Growth doesn't just happen; it must be intentional. When trainers regularly practice the right kinds of reflection, they rapidly improve in their craft. As John Maxwell wrote, “Experience is not the best teacher; evaluated experience is the best teacher. Reflective thinking is needed to turn experience into insight.” In this session you'll discover high leverage reflection strategies that you can adapt, adopt, and apply to your own practice right away.

Explore ways to build transfer of learning into your program before, during and after your training. This session will examine a process to clearly identify what is to be transferred, the context for application on the job, and set measurements for successful pull through. Adopt active learning techniques, a variety of transfer resources, and support to make training a process, not an event.

When we read and listen, we only absorb a snippet of what’s being taught. When we have a chance to interact with the content, our ability to recall the information increases dramatically. This session will focus on bringing content to life, and how to make it stick like Super Glue! Learn simple techniques to empower learners to be confident they can recall material back on the job.

Could AI replace L&D professionals? Not if we leverage the power of this emerging technology to help us create better training! This session will cover the basics of working with the ChaptGPT AI model and provide hands-on experience in generating and fine-tuning training content. Whether you're a novice or an experienced developer, you'll come away with a deeper understanding of how to use ChatGPT to create effective and engaging training materials in half the time! (This session requires a laptop.)

You’ve likely heard of the Enneagram, Myers–Briggs, and StrengthsFinder. These personality inventories help us understand who we are and how we’re gifted, so that we can serve others with authenticity and excellence. But did you know there’s a personality test just for trainers? In this workshop, you’ll discover which of the 10 Trainer Personality Types you are, so you can use your natural gifts to create truly unique learning experiences for your participants.

Nobody has presented at the Creative Training Techniques® Conference more than Rich, every year since 1993. During this closing keynote, Rich will share 10 ideas you can immediately use to get excellent results from training. This capstone session will tie your learning experiences together and charge you to bring the instructor-led, participant-centered movement back to your organization.