Need to get a brand new hire with no experience in the papermaking industry trained before he or she can hit the floor on the clean up crew? Or do you want to get someone from converting ready to work on a paper machine? Or maybe you need to train workers to prepare them for a new position on the paper machine, as they move from Winder Operator to 5th Hand?
If so, papermaking friend, then this is the post for you.
In particular, in this article, we'll discuss that use of visuals within your training materials for onboarding new papermakers more efficiently and effectively.
Learning experts have conducted many studies beginning with two groups of people, both novices in a specific content area (such as papermaking). Each group was trained on the same topic, and that training included all the same words. However, the training provided to one group included no visuals, while the training provided to the other group included helpful learning visuals.
After the training, the people in each group were given tests to determine what they learned. The results were dramatic--the people who completed the training that included visuals consistently learned significantly more than the people in the other group did.
Imagine how much more easily and effectively your paper manufacturing employees might learn from training materials with compelling visuals like those in the sample video below, taken from an online Paper Machine Winding Basics training course.
Although visuals can help improve the effectiveness of your training, that doesn't mean adding just any visual will help.
There's an art to it. Or rather, a science to it. Or rather, a science to the art of it.
Fortunately, lots of smart, talented people have written about this and shared tips for doing it well. We'll give you two great examples, below, from two noted learning experts:
We'll give you some tips from each of these experts (plus links to other articles that discuss the tips from each book in detail and provide example images), and then we'll show you some examples put to use in papermaking training.
Connie Malamed is one of our favorite instructional design experts, and she's got a ton of experience in instructional design and visual design.
Her book Visual Language for Designers includes 25 specific techniques for creating effective training visuals. She groups those 25 specific techniques into six categories, including:
To read more about each of these 25 techniques, and to see specific examples of each, check out our article Graphic Design Tips for Training Visuals.
Dr. Ruth Colvin Clark is another of our favorite instructional design authors. One thing in particular that stands out about her is her insistence on presenting only evidence-based methods that have been proven to be effective. She authored this book with Chopeta Lyons, another smart cookie, and someone with a specific interest in visuals for learning.
As was the case with Malamed's book, the book by Clark and Lyons gives tips for constructing effective training visuals, and groups those tips into specific categories. Those categories include:
Want more details and visual examples of those graphics and information about when to use them? You guessed it. We've got an entire blog post decided to explaining what each of those categories mean and showing specific examples of each. Check out our article on Matching Training Graphics to Training Content.
The courses in the papermaking libraries (pulp, paper, tissue, and corrugated) created by Convergence Training take advantage of special power of graphics to help your new employees get up to speed quickly on essential paper-related training topics.
For example, check out the short sample below taken from our Exhaust Gas Scrubbers training course. (Presenting information in small "chunks" like this is another instructional method that helps new workers, and we've discussed it more fully in our article on chunking and a separate article on chunking for papermaking training.)
You can see for yourself--no pun intended--how effective the visuals make this papermaking training.
You can use this tip when you're creating training materials on your own--just remember to add relevant visuals to your training materials. Or, if you'd like to take advantage of the papermaking training materials by Convergence Training that incorporate life-like visuals, 3-D animations, and more, contact us and let us know what you need.
Many readers are interested in how we create our online paper manufacturing training courses with 3D graphics. This blog post explains how:
How We Create Our Online Paper Manufacturing Training Courses with 3D Imagery
Here are a few longer articles that demonstrate specific techniques for creating visuals that make paper manufacturing training materials more effective:
To see some of these tips in action, and learning a bit about safety issues associated with paper manufacturing at the same time, check out this article:
Paper Manufacturing Safety Tips
And although this article doesn't focus exclusively on visuals, you may find it interesting as well:
15 Tips for Better Paper Manufacturing Training
