Techniques for Developing Speaker Training Courses
Course development expert, Nancy Giere, was our special guest in the Make Money Speaking club on Clubhouse this week.
When host, Lois Creamer, compared the professional speaking business to the “Wild West,” in terms of how venues are approaching hybrid presenting, Nancy said the status of courses and training is similar to speaking because there are so many varied possibilities with how people can be provided with instructional content.
When presenting the option of offering a course to a speaking client, you need to be sure you understand how your client’s employees or audience will best consume your instructional content. Will they expect you in-person or virtual? Will they want your course to be recorded in advance, only live or a combination of the two with follow-up?
Since Nancy’s specialty is working with speaker clients to develop their courses, we went into depth about course development technique, so I’ll keep my notes specific to that topic.
Here are several tips she shared:
One of the biggest roadblocks people run into with building their courses is coming up what content to add to the course. To get beyond this hurdle, Nancy suggested to:
- Make a list from end-to-end.
- Decide what people need to know (5-10 most critical steps to the course).
- Consider what would be “nice” for people to know (companion articles).
- Design a complete blueprint of your course.
- Consider developing a 5-minute sample of your course and use it as a lead magnet.
The next most common obstacle in course development is that people get held back by the technology required to create a course. Sandy suggests creating what she calls an MVP, Minimum Viable Product.
A Minimum Viable Product is enough content to be sellable, and complete enough to educate the user so that the person is capable of taking action steps as you’ve provided them, but with the least amount of work on your end to produce.
Course Terms Speakers Should Know
Nancy defined the difference of three terms used in the courses industry; ILT, VILT, E-Learning.
ILT stands for Instructor Led Training, which is training provided, live, in real-time by an instructor. ILT training does not necessarily mean in-person training, which is where the next acronym comes from.
VILT stands for Virtual Live Training, where your training is provided in a virtual live format over Zoom or some other remote communication system.
E-Learning consists of content that is pre-made for its students. Recorded video, documents, audio recordings are all examples of e-learning tools.
Nancy is providing a series of webinars on course development that we highly recommend if you are a new, emerging or established speaker wanting to add to your revenue streams with an online course or in-person or hybrid training:
For more information about training, watch this portion of a full length interview I did with Nancy Giere who gives tips about how you can build training into your speaking engagements. The full interview is available only in Speakers Speak Group on Facebook!
