Knowledge sharing and training
By Amber Fessler, Contributing Editor | TLT Shop Floor May 2026
Identify two to three key points that you want your audience to walk away with.
Providing training is an important component of many technical people’s responsibilities, and most of us enjoy sharing the knowledge we’ve spent years accumulating. Whether the listeners enjoy it is a separate matter, but one that we are in greater control of than we think.
You’ve probably attended hundreds if not thousands of lectures and training events throughout your education and career. Undoubtedly, you’ve heard speakers who didn’t hold your attention. Maybe you even thought, “That could never be me,” only to occasionally find your own audience’s eyes glazing over. What went wrong? Every minute you spent showing those sales reps how to calculate DN factor was gold!
Sharing your technical knowledge with an audience whose expertise, experience and responsibilities are different from yours is a complex task that can’t be addressed with the same slide deck every time. Whether you’re talking to operators, mechanics, procurement agents or sales professionals, there are a couple questions you can ask yourself to get oriented.
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What do they likely already know?
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What information is relevant to them?
Every listener has the same question when you start speaking: “What’s in this for me?” The importance of asking this on their behalf can’t be understated. For example, you wouldn’t assume a procurement agent knows or cares how an engine works and what causes it to fail, so it’s probably a waste of your energy and their time to talk about blowby and preignition when their job is to help their company spend money wisely. Likewise, the mechanic needs to hear how you can solve their operational problems long before they start considering the cost.
Now that you’re focused on the nature of the content you need to deliver to your audience, ensure you can reach them by organizing it effectively. Aristotle is credited with the idea behind the speaker’s maxim: “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” A logically organized presentation with a roadmap and a summary prevents listener confusion by telling them what to expect and repeating the key points.
Choosing the information to present is where I’ve seen many technical speakers get in their own way. To us, everything about our topic is interesting and important, and many have difficulty teasing out just the vital strands that the audience wants. As a result, even technical audiences may walk away overwhelmed. Studies demonstrate that a day or two after your presentation, people will remember very little of what you told them, so avoid the firehose and identify two to three key points that you want your audience to walk away with.
Some of you just recoiled in disbelief at the idea of only two to three key points, but hear me out: you are building a foundation, not a house. Choose several takeaways that are relevant to the listeners’ needs, then explain and support each one. You’ll have avoided spending too much time on information they don’t want and hopefully opened a door to something they want to explore further.
Storytelling and questions are a great way to keep listeners engaged and connected. The stories you tell them demonstrate how the information fits into the world; the stories they tell you in response offer an avenue to help you connect them to your topic. Carefully crafted questions for your audience keep everyone moving in the direction you are trying to lead them and let you take the temperature on whether they are following you there.
Next time you are preparing training materials, remember to ask yourself what’s in it for your audience, what two to three key points you want them to take away and how you will organize the information in a way that keeps them engaged. Your audience will appreciate it, and they’ll still be awake to thank you for it.
Amber Fessler is senior sector manager, lubricants for CITGO Petroleum Corp. in Houston, Texas. You can reach her at afessle@citgo.com.