Delivering training is one of my greatest pleasures. I was already talking about it four years ago…
As an Aquarius who loooves pouring the waters of knowledge over the world, I still have a blast designing bespoke training programmes, but also delivering them to people who are hungry to understand, experiment and discover new ways of doing things.
And because I mainly work with adults, often in a professional context, I quickly discovered something:
wearing a badge around your neck and having a meeting at 2 p.m. does not suddenly make you lose all desire to play.
Quite the opposite.
It has even become one of my specialities: creating professional training courses and playful workshops that make it possible to learn differently, encourage encounters, create connection, step outside your comfort zone and, above all, actually experiment with what we are talking about.
Because there can be one hell of a gap between understanding something intellectually and being able to use it at work on Monday morning.
Adult training should not look like six hours of PowerPoint
We have all been through that training session.
You are sitting down.
Someone is talking.
A PowerPoint containing approximately 847 slides scrolls past your eyes.
At some point, a pyramid appears.
Nobody really knows why.
By 3:17 p.m., your soul has left your body, but you continue nodding politely.
I do not want to do that.
Professional training can obviously transmit knowledge. But if the aim is for participants to then change something in their practice, knowledge alone is not always enough.
You need to be able to try.
Question.
Get things wrong.
Try again.
Observe what happens.
Compare your experience with other people’s.
And sometimes laugh wholeheartedly at what has just happened.
That is why, whenever possible, I favour active and experiential learning.
I do not only want participants to leave knowing something more.
I want them to have done something with that knowledge.
Bespoke professional training
I am not a great believer in training courses pulled straight out of the freezer.
A management team struggling with communication, a company wanting to strengthen team cohesion and a group wishing to reflect on their relationship with work do not have the same needs, culture or constraints.
So why offer them exactly the same training?
When I design bespoke training for a company or organisation, I therefore begin by understanding what is actually happening.
What is the need?
What is already working?
Where is it getting stuck?
What would you like to see change after the training?
And above all: what should participants be able to do differently when they leave?
That is the basis on which I build the content, exercises and facilitation methods.
Training then becomes a means, not an end.
My speciality: learning through experimentation
I particularly enjoy creating playful, participatory workshops.
Not “playful” in the sense that I am going to force Gérard from Accounts to mime something in front of his colleagues at 8:32 a.m. or be accused of resisting change.
I promise, Gérard.
You can breathe.
Games and experimentation are interesting when they have a pedagogical purpose.
They can very quickly reveal a group dynamic, a communication reflex, a relational difficulty or a different way of solving a problem.
Above all, they make visible mechanisms we could spend hours talking about without ever actually observing.
That is when the experience becomes interesting.
We are no longer merely talking about what we do. We can look at what we have just actually done.
Learning, experimenting… and even having fun
I like people to think during training.
I like questions.
I like disagreement.
I like the moment when someone says:
“Wait, I don’t agree.”
Excellent.
Now we have something to work with.
A good training course should call on participants’ judgement, critical thinking and capacity for reflection.
It should not infantilise them.
Adults arrive with experience, knowledge, habits, doubts, resistance and sometimes excellent reasons to question what they are being told.
That is material.
So rather than asking people to absorb a ready-made answer, I prefer to create situations in which they can test, compare, debate and draw conclusions.
And yes, sometimes laugh.
You can work seriously without constantly taking yourself seriously.
Training is not content consumption
This has become even more obvious with online training.
Watching a video is not necessarily learning.
Reading a PDF is not necessarily learning.
Clicking “next” seventeen times in an e-learning module is definitely not necessarily learning.
Consuming content is not learning.
Learning requires something to happen with the information.
Connecting it to existing knowledge.
Retrieving it.
Using it.
Testing it.
Making a mistake.
Correcting it.
Explaining it.
Applying it in another context.
That is why, when I work on online training or e-learning, I am interested in what the learner is actually going to do between two pieces of content.
An exercise.
A decision.
A case study.
A question.
A situation to analyse.
A real-life experiment.
Something that turns passive exposure into active engagement.
Designing pedagogical experiences for existing training programmes
I do not necessarily need to create the entire training course.
Sometimes you already have the expertise.
You already have the content.
You know exactly what you want to teach.
But the training lacks interaction, experimentation or a way of turning knowledge into something participants can actually use.
That interests me too.
I can design pedagogical workshops, role-plays, games, case studies, icebreakers and practical exercises that fit into an existing programme.
The objective is not to add entertainment for entertainment’s sake.
It is to ask:
“What experience would help participants understand this idea rather than merely hear it?”
Training programmes adapted to your people, your context and your objectives
Over the years, I have had the opportunity to work with very different organisations and audiences:
ALEP, SOAT, the En Embuscade micro-nursery, Astro Bitch, Cuisinella, L’Or du Commun, Contact + and Marschall SAS…
Different organisations, different audiences, different needs.
And that is exactly what I enjoy.
I do not want to endlessly repeat the same training course in front of different people.
I prefer to understand what you need and build something that makes sense for you.
Are you looking for bespoke training for your company?
You may already have a very precise idea.
Or simply a problem:
“My team is no longer communicating properly.”
“Our managers could use some support.”
“We would like to work on cohesion.”
“Something is happening in this team, but we are struggling to put our finger on it.”
That works for me too.
We can start with the problem rather than the solution.
I design professional training courses, participatory workshops and bespoke interventions, particularly around human relationships, communication, management and cooperation.
And what do I like most about my job?
Being asked to do it again.
So, will the next training session be for you?
Contact me. I would be delighted to discuss it with you.