As night follows day – people need training.  It’s what helps us to do our jobs safely, secure much sought-after promotions, develop career paths and even just gets us around an unfamiliar worksite unharmed…

But before we sing its praises too heavily, let us also be brutally honest, good (and even bad) training can come at a high cost – both in terms of expense, as well as time spent by the trainer and trainee.

So, what training formats are typically on offer?  We’re all familiar with traditional Face-to-Face learning, it offers the chance for experienced trainers to impart their subject matter expertise to a room full of knowledge hungry students.  In the last 20 years or so we’ve also seen a boom in E-learning, allowing knowledge to be shared with larger audiences at a fraction of the cost and independent of time or location constraints.

More recently, there is the much-touted Blended Learning, which merges traditional face-to-face classroom style teaching with E-learning packages, providing a highly effective means of sharing knowledge in different formats at the convenience of both trainer and trainee.

However, one mechanism is often overlooked: Assisted Delivery.

Assisted Delivery provides a course which ‘self-delivers’ in the same way as an E-learning course – with voice-over, graphics, video segments – but provides the opportunity for the facilitator to jump in, where confident to do so, and lead group interactions around particular video clips, diagrams, or case studies, etc.

We used Assisted Delivery when we developed a rail industry training course on the topic of Safety Critical Communications.  The course needed to address around 40,000 front line staff across multiple rail organisations – and there was no way we could have delivered the training to so many people through a traditional face-to-face course alone.  Yet at the same time, it was critical that we applied industry-wide protocols to often unique local situations.

By using Assisted Delivery we were able to place an in-depth 6-module course into the hands of local company managers who could then deliver the course with confidence at a time and frequency which suited the business.  Each of the individual learning groups were able to discuss the content, benefiting from the associated peer interaction and ‘social learning’, as well as apply the learning to their own specific local circumstances.

Assisted Delivery is not a universal panacea, but it is worth considering as a valuable part of your training portfolio.