When you’ve garnered enough experience working in your industry, it’s important to share what you’ve learned to other people. If you’re a successful business owner, for example, one of the ways you can give back to your community is to become a business advisor for aspiring entrepreneurs.
However, even if you’ve learned all there is to know about running a company, you won’t be able to share your knowledge with others if you don’t know how to teach. Teaching is a whole different language compared to what you’ve been doing. If you want other people to learn from you, first you need to learn how to teach them.
Have a curriculum
One of the things that make it hard for experts to teach others is that they don’t know where to begin or how to lay down their knowledge. Everything they’ve learned has already become instinctive that they rarely think about what to do when they need to fix a problem at work.
You need to start thinking about the steps you took in order to get to where you are right now. The best way to this is to come up with a curriculum. This will help you build a structure wherein you can see what topics you need to touch on to make your students understand what you’re talking about.
Be concise
Your students aren’t high school or college students. If you’re conducting a seminar on how to properly manage a small business, it means the people who will attend your class are professionals like you. This means that they don’t have the time to dilly dally because every minute they spend outside the office could be money wasted.
Say, you’re going to teach a class of managers how to use effective marketing strategies in 2019. Make sure that your curriculum touches only on that subject. Their time is precious, so you need to give them what they came for right away.
Be lively
Trying to teach for the first time may seem awkward for you, so chances are you’ll sound stiff when you talk to your students. If you want to feel and sound natural when you’re teaching, avoid giving a lecture. Lectures are boring and according to experts, they’re the least effective way of teaching.
The best way to make your class lively and help your students retain your lessons is to make them part of the curriculum. Ask your students to reenact certain scenarios in the office that are related to what you’re teaching.
If you’re teaching effective salesmanship, ask them to reenact situations wherein one of them will play the role of the client and the other will play the salesperson. This way, you’ll be teaching them more effectively because you’re not simply stating all the information in your curriculum.
In order to know that your students really learn what you’re teaching them, you should ask them to apply your lessons to their companies. Tell them that the day they go back to their offices is the day they start applying what you’ve taught them.
Now, even though you taught them everything you know about business management, it doesn’t mean that your methods will work in their companies. You should still be available to help them make some adjustments if needed.
