Training presentation structure

The customer training deck on this site is eleven slides for a seventy five minute session, and its agenda slide says something unusual on it: “two of these five you do, rather than watch”. That sentence is the whole difference between a training deck and a deck about a subject. Two of the five blocks are the learner working, and the slides for those blocks are almost empty, because nothing needs to be on screen while somebody builds their first expense claim on their own phone.

Training is not a lecture

Robert Gagné’s nine events of instruction, taught in most teaching centres and summarised well by Northern Illinois University, are a useful check on any training deck: gain attention, state the objectives, recall prior learning, present the content, provide guidance, elicit performance, give feedback, assess performance, and support retention and transfer.

Count how many of those are the trainer talking. Three, maybe four. The rest are the learner doing something, and the deck’s job in those events is to hold a scenario or an instruction still while it happens.

Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center puts the same idea as a principle: “goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback enhances the quality of students’ learning”. Practice with no goal is an exercise. Feedback with no practice is a lecture. A training deck has to make room for both, and the room is measured in minutes rather than slides.

The six blocks

The table under this article collapses Gagné’s nine events into six blocks you can actually build slides for, with the roles that fit each and a minute budget at three session lengths.

The order is the part that is not negotiable. Objectives before context, because people listen differently once they know what they will be asked to do. Context before demonstration, because a change nobody has justified gets resisted rather than learned. Demonstration before practice. Check after practice, not before, or you are testing reading rather than doing.

The roles come from the twenty six the builder ships, and the specialist ones are thin on purpose: five quiz layouts, five question and answer layouts, seven takeaway layouts, against thirty one for comparison and sixteen for process. If a role only has five layouts it is because that slide is rare, not because it is unimportant.

Writing objectives people can be tested on

An objective is a sentence somebody could mark. Indiana University’s guidance on learning outcomes is to pick “active, measurable verbs, the tasks you want students to do” rather than know or understand, which cannot be observed.

The example deck’s third slide is a good model. It sets a condition, “without opening a manual, and without ringing the finance team”, and then lists things a person will be able to do: capture a receipt and attach it to a claim in under a minute; enter a mileage journey and explain why the first ten thousand miles are paid at a different rate; submit a claim before the fifth and find out who it went to for approval.

Each of those has a verb, a limit and a way of being checked. Three or four is the right number for an hour. Six is a course.

Demonstrate then practise

Show the model before the buttons. The example deck puts a diagram at slide five, the four stages a claim passes through with the one stage the learner owns marked on it, and only then the five step workflow at slide six. A learner who has the map can recover from a wrong turn; a learner who has only the steps cannot.

The demonstration slide should be the workflow the room follows along with, on their own device, as it is shown. That is the difference between watching and doing, and it costs nothing structurally because it is the same slide.

Then get out of the way. The practice block in the example is twenty minutes on one slide, described in the agenda as “the longest part”. If your deck has ten slides for the practice block, you have written a demonstration and called it practice.

Checks: quiz slides and questions

Two kinds of check do different jobs and the example uses both.

Slide seven is a scenario with no clean answer: you paid for a client dinner, the itemised bill went in the bin, payroll closes in two days, what do you do first? The instruction on the slide is “pick one, then we will argue about it”. An argument is a check, because it surfaces what people believe rather than what they can repeat.

Slide nine is a straight comprehension question on the rule people get wrong most often, with the answer and the reason both shown. Being asked to produce an answer, rather than to recognise a correct one, is one of the better evidenced ways to make something stick, and the case for it is collected at retrievalpractice.org.

One thing to be clear about: a quiz slide here is not an interactive quiz. Nobody clicks an option and gets a score. It holds the question on screen while a room answers out loud, which is what a live session needs and what a self-paced course does not.

Timing at 30, 60 and 90 minutes

The minute columns in the table are not evenly scaled, and that is the point. Going from thirty minutes to ninety does not triple every block. Objectives stay at about five minutes however long the session runs, because there are still only three of them. Context roughly doubles. Practice nearly quadruples, from eight minutes to thirty, because practice is the only block that can absorb the extra time usefully.

The example deck’s agenda puts numbers on the blocks in front of the room: ten minutes on why it changed, fifteen on the model, twenty on building a first claim, and fifteen minutes of questions at the end. Publishing the budget on slide two is worth doing for a reason that has nothing to do with timekeeping. It tells people when they will be asked to work, so nobody is caught out at minute thirty five with no phone.

Handouts and recording

The handout is the summary slide, not the deck. Slide ten of the example is headed “photograph this” and carries five rules, which is a format people keep and a PDF is not.

If you do send the file, the PDF export is available on every plan and carries the slides exactly as they look. Your speaker notes are not in it, and they are not in either PowerPoint export either, so anything you only said out loud needs writing down separately. Writing the notes as four short lines per slide makes that a small job rather than a rewrite.

Recording is built into presenting mode: a WebM file at thirty frames a second, 1080p, 1440p or 4K, optional camera overlay and microphone, pause and resume, downloaded to your machine. It is a paid feature and it needs a current browser, and a recorded session is a different artefact from a live one, so expect to trim the practice block out of it.

The example

The customer training deck is eleven slides for seventy five minutes: cover, agenda, objectives, why it changed, the model, the workflow, a scenario, the four common mistakes, a comprehension check, a card to photograph, and six seeded questions rather than “any questions?”.

For a shorter shift induction, the training and onboarding presentation is nine slides for two hours. And if you are starting from a topic rather than a plan, the presentation maker chooses a purpose for every slide before it writes a word, which is the same discipline as choosing the block first.