Experiential training is an effective method that enables people to improve and acquire new knowledge, skills, competencies and change their behaviours and attitudes. Experiential training includes both simple exercises and dynamic outdoor activities in order to introduce the participants into the Experience Learning Circle.
Experiential training has three distinctive characteristics:
- Reality simulation. The games and challenges actually simulate the conditions that participants have to deal with in real life.
- Environment of emotional security. This environment encourages participants to experiment and learn through trial-and-error.
- Employment of three different perception modes, (visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic). In this way, all participants ‘receive’ the necessary information, regardless of their preferred perception modes.
The benefits of experiential training and development include the:
- Feeling of urgency (we improve on action)
- Addition of new behaviours to the already existing ‘menu’
- Ability of behaviour and attitude selection
- Long-term attitude modification.
Experiential training can be used as:
- Independent training/development program
- Part of a broader training program (e.g. section of a conference, follow up of a previous training program, etc.)
Every time we apply the Experience Learning Circle we set three basic questions:
What (did I do)? - So what? - Now what?
The Experience Learning Circle is actually illustrating the way that we ‘learn’ things. We experience a situation, feel some emotions, analyze them, reach conclusions and general principles, ‘store’ them and implement them in other aspects of our lives. In order to satisfy the needs of a company, we have designed activities that can be executed:
- Indoor (e.g. offices, seminar rooms, and sports halls) or outdoor
- At a place of your choice (e.g. hotels, conference rooms, etc), in Greece or abroad.
The criteria that we use to select the right outdoor activities relate to the areas that you need to improve, the size of the team, its previous experience and the available time.
