TRAINING The Training Page of Volunteer Today has practical trainer techniques and activities to make orientation sessions more productive and valuable. There are also ideas to help enhance the professional volunteer managers training level.
~ April 2003 ~Topics	Should I Quit My Job? A Decision Making Strategy Closing Exercise to Review Content Test Your ALQ

Anyone who manages people is often faced with tough choices. Developing different decision making strategies provides for a healthy future and sometimes personal sanity. Here is an exercise to that can be used to make decisions of the most important kind.

Imagine you are unhappy on your job and considering whether to quit. Resigning is but one option. What are the other actions you could take to improve this situation? Pretend you are a hired “decision consultant.” Ask yourself, “What Else?" and think of other alternative possiblities before deciding. Look for new territory. Seek solutions to increase your freedom of choice. Try writing the ideas down in the following chart.
Directions: Consider the types of choices listed in the left hand column. What else could you do that would be an example of that type of choice?
TYPE OF CHOICE	WHAT ELSE?
Example: IMMORAL	You could steal organizational resources or money so you would be fired. (Seems like a silly, “What else?” but creativity means forcing your brain to work outside its normal patterns. Below are more choices, your task is to think of alternative possibilities and new solutions.)
RISKY
PRACTICAL
IRRATIONAL
MYSTICAL
FOOLISH
RATIONAL
INTUITIVE
MORAL

This decision making model can be applied to other work or personal choices.

Closing Exercise to Review Content

Reviewing the content covered in training sessions for volunteers is a big step in aiding retention. Here is a clever means to keep people focused during training and a tool to conduct a review at the end.

• Provide each person with a nametag on which there is a question about som area of content that will be covered during the training session. Tell each person to pay attention to this topic during the session, as they will be asked about it at the end. (It is also helpful to encourage people to note the questions of their fellow learners and help one another have answers before the session is over.)
  
• At the end of the training session each person reads the question on his/her tag and then gives the answer. The other class participants decide if the answers are correct or not. Wrong answers are corrected by the group.

The more a trainer knows about how adults learn the better chance they will construct effective training sessions. Test your Adult Learning Quotient in this quiz.

for An Introduction to Helping Adults Learn and Change, authored by Russell D. Robinson.

Close to 200 colleges and universities offer academic programs on nonprofit and volunteer sector management. They are usually master's degree programs, but not always. American Humanics sponsors undergraduate programs, as well. If you are looking to push out the professional development window, consider taking a course at one of these colleges. A full list resides at http://pirate.shu.edu/~mirabero/kellogg.html. Thank Roseanne Mirabella, of Seton Hall University for keeping up with this list.