Training is a critical component of any successful business. As spa professionals, you succeed through the mastery of your trades. As a team, you rely on each other’s expertise and commitment to offer a high-caliber service to your clients. Achieving this requires keeping your finger on the pulse of best business and trade practices.
Log in to view the full article
Training is a critical component of any successful business. As spa professionals, you succeed through the mastery of your trades. As a team, you rely on each other’s expertise and commitment to offer a high-caliber service to your clients. Achieving this requires keeping your finger on the pulse of best business and trade practices.
Related: 5 Tips to Make the Most of Your Marketing Dollars During a Recession
I encourage you to explore this question: Do your business and staff miss out on opportunities to increase revenue and client satisfaction because of a lack of training? Is there a skill you’ve tried to teach them but they never seem to learn and apply it?
Let’s take retail sales as an example. Do you have products collecting dust on your retail shelves and in your storage area that would much better serve your revenue and clients’ needs if your staff learned how to sell them? Retail selling is perhaps one of the hardest things to convince a staff to do because it’s uncomfortable. Training sessions can help teach your staff and get them comfortable with operating procedures.
If you don't have the resources to hire an on-site consultant, consider conducting the training session yourself, using these core elements of Instructional Systems Design (ISD).
Decide on the Skill You’re Going to Teach
Example: Teach staff how to sell retail products to their clients.
Determine the Why
According to Introduction to Instructional Systems Design: Theory and Practice by Chuck Hodell, Ph.D., adult learners want to know the reason behind any learning experience, especially if they’re required to participate in the training.
For example, learning how to sell retail products will increase their earning potential, ensure clients have the resources they need to keep their hair, skin and nails in the best shape with professional products and it can offer staff new marketable skills to help them grow
A list of reasons like this can turn the learning process into something mutually beneficial.
List Actions That Need to be Taken
Make a list of what the data says about your current situation. What is the weekly average amount of products sold? Who are the top sellers? Who are the bottom ones? What products sell best? What products sell the worst? What knowledge, skills and abilities are needed to sell retail products?
You want to analyze the data because it forms the basis for what needs to be learned.
Related: 3 Approaches to Upselling Massage Therapy
Write Learning Objectives
Learning objectives are the blueprint for a training session. They’re made up of a terminal objective and supportive enabling objectives. They help you to create a pathway to stay on track and to measure the degree to which your staff mastered them. For learning objectives to offer these qualities, they must be measurable and observable. Professional instructional designers will write their terminal objective using ABCD parts: Audience, Behavior, Condition and Degree. Let’s break these down.
Audience: Who is the learner?
Example: The XYZ Spa Staff Member
Behavior: What do you want the audience to be able to do by the end of the training session? This is often written as "should be able to…" You should never use words like learn, understand or any unobservable or unmeasurable verb since you can’t evaluate these for mastery. Instead, opt for action verbs like determine, discuss, list, perform, decide, demonstrate, etc. These are verbs that can be measured and observed.
Example: Learners should be able to increase retail sales by 10%.
Condition: What is the learner given in terms of tangible and procedural course elements to support the learning? Common tangible conditions include items like books, handouts, computers and other items a learner will use in a course. Procedural conditions include elements like demonstrations, role-plays, discussions, lectures and presentations.
Example: The learner is given a demonstration, roleplay exercise and an online resource video.
Degree: This will state how and to what degree a learner will be expected to demonstrate mastery.
Examples: Demonstrate mastery within a three-month period, with at least 80% out of 100% on an exam, or without error.
Here’s an example of how our ABCD elements are written in the customary CABD format: Given a demonstration and role-playing exercises, the XYZ Spa Staff Member should be able to increase retail sales by 10% within a three-month period.
Enabling Objectives
These are objectives that help support the overall terminal objective and will serve as the roadmap for your training plan. These should always be written with action verbs so mastery can be measured.
To increase retail sales by 10% within a three-month period, the XYZ Spa Staff Member should be able to do the following:
- List a minimum of three ways to sell a retail product to a customer
- Determine what fact you’ll use to educate on the product
- Demonstrate how to upsell a retail service or product
- Describe at least 2 benefits for at least 5 retail products
Putting the ABCDs All Together
In all of these enabling objectives, you’ll be able to determine if they’ve mastered the skill through either observation or testing and it offers you a clear roadmap for the training.
The focus of the course should center on the enabling objectives. To plan the training, brainstorm methods and skills to teach the audience about each one of these objectives. You can use demonstrations, role-playing, handouts, etc. to teach them. You’ll determine the degree to which they performed the objective, either through a written/online quiz or observation of them performing the four objectives.
Design the Training
Now that you have a roadmap derived from the learning objectives, you can put your training course together. Think about the needs of your staff when considering how to design the training. Would they benefit more from a computer-based, self-paced course that you create with PowerPoint or would they learn better in an in-person capacity? What methods will you use to teach them the information? These are your conditions. The point of the training is to master the learning objectives, so always keep the learning objectives front and center as you plan your training.
Conduct Training
According to Robert Gagne, an American educator, there are nine events of instruction that may enhance learning. Dr. Chuck Hodell presents Gagne’s events of instruction in an easy-to-follow format in the Introduction to Instructional Systems Design: Theory and Practice. Hodell advises the goal of any learning event should be to get the learner to mastery. Let’s dissect Hodell’s take on Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction below.
Using Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction
Step 1: Gaining Attention
Drum up interest and draw the learner into the experience. To gain attention, you can present an engaging story that’s relevant, ask a thought-provoking question, present an engaging video, demonstrate the task to be learned or conduct a roleplaying exercise.
Step 2: Stating the Learning Objectives
Tell the learner what they’re going to learn. This sets expectations about what will be covered and what knowledge, skills and abilities they can expect to take away from it.
Step 3: Recall
Encourage learners to recall prerequisite information. To stimulate recall, ask questions that require the learner to draw on their prior knowledge. It’s helpful to refer to pre-existing knowledge that you’re confident they already know.
Step 4: Content
Here you present the content for each learning objective, breaking it down into chunks to make it easier to digest. The content must align with your learning objectives.
Step 5: Guided Learning - Level 1 Application Feedback
Provide strategies and suggestions that learners can use to absorb or remember the content easily, like with mnemonic devices. You might also offer ideas about what they can do on their own time to reinforce the new skills or knowledge.
Step 6: Eliciting Performance - Level 2 Application Feedback
Here you provide practice opportunities. By repeatedly applying new knowledge or skills, they can gradually encode the new content into long-term memory.
Step 7: Feedback - Level 3 Application Feedback
When you provide practice opportunities in Level 2, you must provide feedback. Provide detailed explanations for why something may be incorrect or correct. It’s critical to provide this feedback as soon as possible for it to be meaningful.
Step 8: Evaluation
Assess the degree to which the participants learned the new knowledge or skills. This can be in the form of trainer observation and/or an assessment quiz.
Step 9: Closure
Closure helps the learner transfer the new skills or knowledge to their lives or to the job. You can use handouts or other resources for this. You can also encourage the learner to think about how they’ll use the information to draw a connection to the real world.
These events can occur in any order, but they all should be present in any training session. Taking the time to plan training will increase the likelihood that it’ll lead your staff to mastery over any given topic.
Isn’t that the whole point of training?
Dennise Cardona is a Learning Experience Designer and Creative Director at Sunny Bee Productions. She serves on the faculty of the Instructor Certification Program at the International Masonry Institute. Most passionately, she is also the Co-Host and Producer of Instructional Design from the Ground Up YouTube Show, helping to bring her love and curiosity of learning experience design to the ISD community.
