Do you ever feel that the training process has become monotonous? Does the thought of standing up at the front of a training room and working through the same old bullet-point slides make you want to scream? If so, don't panic, help is at hand.

The methods and techniques of training are well established. So well established that some tricks of the trade have become hackneyed and tired. Training+ will help you to break out of a training rut and develop new ways of getting the message across.

At the book's core is a detailed compendium of actions that will help you to transform your training to Training+. Together with a guide to determine the direction your training should take and advice on pulling together a practical agenda for change, it's all you need to bring new life to your training.

Brian Clegg's infectious enthusiasm, along with his examples, exercises and expert knowledge of the power of new technology will transform the way you develop your staff in the future. By utilizing ideas used in business creativity, this inspirational yet practical book will help you to experiment with some of the new training approaches that are rapidly gaining ground and let you develop new techniques that will provide long-lasting results.

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Training - the good news

There has never been more need for training and education. A hundred years ago, change was like the slow, steady flow of an untroubled river. You could start a job at the age of 14 and expect still to be doing it until you were too old to work. Companies could realistically offer a job for life to a worker who was happy not to cause any trouble. It’s not that there wasn’t change, but the changes that occurred, apart from one-off catastrophes like the First World War, were manageable and unthreatening.

We have a very different picture now. Change is the norm. Not a gradual change but a hectic, ever-accelerating explosion of change. No one expects to stay with the same company for life. Many are opting for self-employment or being forced into it. Knowledge that was good a year ago is already becoming out of date. Stability is for wimps. In this frantic world, training can be both an anchor and a lifeline. An anchor because it has a clear, focused objective, and a lifeline because it enables the individual to keep up with the pace of change and enables the company to keep above water. Training has become the number one survival pack for business.

Training - the bad news

So far, so good. If you are a trainer you are probably patting yourself on the back for being such a valuable person. The truth is that, while the previous section is entirely true, that training can be all these good things, in practice it rarely is. Ask anyone who works in a large company to name the dynamic, important departments in the company. They might mention marketing or sales. They might come up with some operational functions. They are very unlikely to mention training. Time for some home truths:

• Many training departments have a bad image.
• Many companies will say training and development are amongst their top priorities. Almost always they change their mind when money is short.
• Too much training that is currently undertaken has very little impact on what the trainees do when they return to the workplace at the end of the course.
• Too much training is uninspiring.

In a world of change, it’s time for a shake-up in training and development.