What makes a good soft skills training workshop?

If you’re thinking about coming to one of my training workshops, what can you expect? How can you know that you’ll get what you want from it? The success of a soft-skills workshop rests on a blend of things. There’s the content of course, but what sets the best workshops apart are the aspects related to people and how these are addressed.

People are the most important part of any workshop. They can come feeling confident, apprehensive, or sometimes fearful. In fact they can bring more apprehension to a soft skills training session than they would to a live scenario, (I certainly used to). Here’s how I run my workshops. If you like the sound of this, take a look at my forthcoming Masterclass dates and IDM Presentation Skills workshop.

My aim is to get us off to a good start, work well in the day and leave with an action plan to take things forward.

A good start: I like to say hello before we meet. I’ll send you something that gets you thinking about what you want to work on, what difference progress would make. You’ll become aware of any preparation that you need to do. And you can do it. No nasty surprises. And you can find out about me.

A group with things in common and differences: You could be from an Institute, Society, Trade Association or other membership body. If you’re coming to my IDM workshop, you’ll be in marketing, either on the supplier side or the client side. You’ll be meeting and working with your peers and as such will have the chance to learn as much from them as you do from me. It’s a great way to expand your professional network.

Good beginnings: We start the session with introductions and goals. Everyone has the time and space to settle in, speak, to become present in the room and volunteer what they want to work on and why. When everyone hears themselves, they’ve spoken. With this, the ice breaks. And when you hear each other speak, you start to realise, “I’m not alone”.

Encouragement to stretch: it’s important to practise skills, yet this can be the scariest part of a soft skills workshop. So, we build up to the first practise. And then we have another in the afternoon. These are the two steps that will take you up to a new level smoothly.

Blending discussion and information: there’s a balance to be struck here. I provide practical information and tips. But making a change to your soft skills is often about working things out for yourself. And a good way to do this is through discussion and sharing.

Feedback on practise: this is managed sensitively and well. Each speaker gets to say how they think it went. The group are invited to share what they noticed and I offer my view. The goal is for balanced, constructive feedback. The trust established between the group at the start of the session, prepares the ground for this to happen.

Action orientated: What’s next for you? A workshop is a day out of the office. But it needs to be more than that. So there is time and space to think about, what next? For me? How will I continue what I’ve started? And the beauty of a soft skills workshop is that there are plenty of simple ways to take this forward.

Good endings: Finally, we circle back to look at the goal for the day. The group comes back together to share what has happened with their goal. Have they met it? Has it changed? What am I leaving with? And often this is when you’ll make connections with each other and keep in touch.

Many of my groups leave with a promise to stay in touch and to trade experiences, successes and stumbles. I see them as a learning unit, able to contribute to each others success. This is the recipe for my workshops. Maybe we’ll meet at my next one.

Find out about forthcoming Masterclasses.