Increasing your training budget ROI; it’s the holy grail for all HR and L&D Managers. Is the answer online training? Is it on the job training or on-site technical courses? There are so many training options to consider, as well as the style of trainer themselves. Each aspect is a vital component of getting the best return on your investment and generating real change in your business.
Bringing training to life
If you have selected a face to face training course, have you discussed with your training provider the impact colour can have on its effectiveness? Colourful learning can increase your ROI and here’s why:
- Colour adds visual stimulation and engagement. It appeals to different types of learners.
- Colour can allow respondents to express emotion.This enables them to engage with the training on a deeper, more emotional level.
- Colour makes things more interesting. After all, who would go back to black and white TV?
Colourful touchpoints at every point in the learning journey
There are many ways to effectively introduce colour to the learning process:
- Right from the registration or welcome pack, colour can start to engage employees in the activity. This could mean colourful welcome emails, microsite or intranet sites and course instructions. Of course, these may need to follow corporate colours, but these generally still give plenty of scope for creating visually stimulating information.
- The training room itself. The training environment is vital to learning success. It needs to cater to the basic human needs of warmth, light and suitable sound levels. But those are just the hygiene factors to build on. Colour can then be introduced in several ways. Provide different colours of pens for delegates to use – be it for their own note taking or for white board/flipchart work. Consider different coloured post it notes, pads and paper. Even the way a facilitator dresses can create a different response from delegates.
- Training materials. Gone are the days of presentations and training materials with blocks of black text on white pages. These may have appealed to Auditory learners as they listened to the presentations, but not for VAK’s model Visual learners. Any slides and printed handbooks should include plenty of colourful text and images to give them impact and interest.
By bringing the senses into play you can harness the very essence of the human spirit to stimulate the will and the ability to learn. Hands-on creative sessions can incorporate shapes and colours to engender a team atmosphere, promote interactivity and simply make learning easier and more fun. Colour can bring learning to life and make it a motivating, memorable collective occasion.
At Nuggets of Learning, using colour is one of the innovative learning techniques we specialise in. Our personal and management development workshops use accelerated learning techniques that incorporate colour, sounds and creativity to maximise ROI and create real change.
About the Author
Beverlie Wilkinson has served as the Director of Nuggets of Learning Ltd. She has worked as an HR Advisor and Learning & Development specialist and has continued her work in the UK and has an HR certification from the CIPD.
