Day 19: Write a Training Programme Outline
The Concept
Most workplace training fails. This is not a controversial claim — it is well-documented in learning and development research, and most experienced HR professionals know it intuitively from their own programmes. Participants attend, they find it useful, they score it highly on the feedback form, and then they go back to their desks and continue doing what they were doing before. The knowledge was transferred. The behaviour did not change.
The reason training fails is almost always a design failure, not a delivery failure. The training was designed to teach people things rather than to change what they do. It was structured around topics — policy sections, information categories, concept frameworks — rather than around the specific moments of application where behaviour needs to be different. And the session ended without any mechanism to support transfer back to the workplace, where the real test of the learning would eventually happen in conditions of pressure, ambiguity, and competing demands that no training room replicates.
The Difference Between Information and Behaviour Change
Information transfer is easy. You can transfer information with an email, a policy document, or a 30-minute e-learning module. Behaviour change is hard, and it requires a different kind of design. It requires identifying the specific moment in which the new behaviour needs to occur — the conversation the manager keeps avoiding, the data handling decision that gets made quickly without proper thought, the absence trigger that managers spot but do not act on. It requires giving participants practice in that specific moment, not just information about what to do. And it requires some form of follow-through mechanism — because skills acquired in training fade rapidly without reinforcement.
The shift in design thinking is from "what do participants need to know?" to "what do participants need to be able to do, in which specific situations, and what is stopping them doing it now?" That question produces a very different session outline. It pushes you toward role-play and case-based activities rather than presentations. It pushes you toward pre-work that surfaces real situations rather than pre-reading that surfaces theory. And it pushes you toward a transfer plan rather than a feedback form.
How AI Structures From Learning Objectives
The most important structural move in training design is writing learning objectives in behavioural terms before you design anything else. A behavioural objective describes what a participant will be able to do — specifically, observably, in a defined context — not what they will understand or appreciate. "Managers will be able to structure and conduct a performance conversation using the three-step model" is a behavioural objective. "Managers will understand the importance of addressing performance issues early" is not.
When you give AI a specific learning need and a measure of success and ask for behavioural objectives first, it structures everything downstream from those objectives. The activities are chosen because they develop the specific behaviour described in the objective. The pre-work is designed to bring real situations into the room that the activity will work with. The transfer plan is designed to reinforce the same behaviour back in the workplace. This is how training design should work, and it is often the sequence that time-pressured HR teams skip when they design programmes quickly.
What Still Needs Subject Matter Expert Review
AI produces a credible training structure, but it does not know your organisation's specific policy, your facilitators' capabilities, or the precise nature of the behaviour gap you are trying to close. The outline it produces is a starting point for a conversation with a subject matter expert — whether that is an employment lawyer reviewing the legal accuracy of a compliance module, a senior manager validating that the scenarios reflect real situations, or an experienced facilitator checking that the activities will work with your specific audience.
The transfer support plan in particular needs to be tested against your actual context. AI will produce generic transfer actions — manager briefings, check-in conversations, 30-day reviews — but whether those actions are realistic depends on your managers' capacity, your HR team's resource, and whether your organisation's culture supports that kind of follow-through. Use the outline as the starting design, not the finished product, and let subject matter review and facilitation experience shape the final version.
Prompt of the day
Copy this into your AI tool and replace any bracketed placeholders.
Prompt
You are a learning and development specialist who designs training programmes grounded in behaviour change rather than information transfer. You understand that the goal of workplace training is not for participants to know more when they leave the room — it is for them to do something differently when they are back at their desks, dealing with real situations under real pressure. My situation: - Training topic: [e.g. conducting difficult conversations / absence management for line managers / unconscious bias awareness / GDPR and data handling for non-IT staff] - Target audience: [e.g. 24 line managers, mixed experience levels, most with no prior formal management training, working across three sites] - Learning need: [e.g. managers are avoiding difficult conversations about performance and attendance, which is leading to cases being escalated to HR that should be resolved at team level] - Format and duration available: [e.g. half-day face-to-face session, or 90-minute online session with pre-work] - What we already have: [e.g. a policy document, a previous 45-minute e-learning module that participants completed but that has not changed behaviour] - How we will know it has worked: [e.g. a reduction in formal HR referrals for performance conversations over the following quarter, and manager self-reported confidence scores before and after] Please produce: 1. Three learning objectives — written in behavioural terms (what participants will be able to DO, not what they will know). Each objective should be specific, observable, and achievable within the time available. 2. A session outline — broken into modules with approximate timings, brief description of each module's purpose, and the activity or method used (not just 'presentation'). Include at least two application activities where participants practise the skill, not just hear about it. 3. A pre-work task — something participants can do in 15 minutes before the session that prepares them to engage with the content and brings their own real experience into the room. 4. A transfer support plan — three actions that happen after the training to support behaviour change back in the workplace. These should not require a large budget or a dedicated L&D function to implement.
Your 15-minute task
Identify one training need that has been on your to-do list but has not been designed yet — or one programme you know is not working because it transfers information without changing behaviour. Fill in the prompt fields with specific detail, especially the learning need and the measure of success — those two fields anchor everything else. Run the prompt and focus first on the learning objectives: are they behavioural, or have they slipped into knowledge objectives? ('Understand the policy' is a knowledge objective. 'Apply the three-step conversation structure in a simulated performance conversation' is a behavioural one.) The transfer support plan is the part most likely to be omitted from training design — check that AI has produced something realistic for your context.
Expected win
A complete training outline with behavioural objectives, a structured session plan with application activities, a pre-work task that brings real experience into the room, and a post-training transfer plan — everything needed to brief a facilitator, commission a supplier, or run the session yourself.
Power user tip
The biggest single predictor of whether training changes behaviour is manager involvement before and after — not during. Run a second prompt after generating the outline: 'Write a one-page briefing for the line manager of each participant, to be sent one week before the training. The briefing should explain what the session is about and why their report is attending, include one specific question the manager should ask their report before the session to prime their thinking, and include two follow-up questions the manager should ask within a week of the session to reinforce what was covered.' When managers know what their team member is learning and ask about it, the probability of behaviour transfer increases significantly. When they do not, training often evaporates within two weeks.