There is no ideal length of training session. However, sessions of longer than five to six hours in a single day will tax participants' and trainers' energies and attention spans, and possibly lead to reduced effectiveness. Especially for senior polling officials, multi-day training may be necessary to cover both management and procedural issues. Where relatively experienced polling staff are being trained, procedural training may be completed in a half day, and in a full day for less experienced staff. Where polling officials or other staff are also being trained as trainers, it would be unlikely that sufficient effective training skills would be learned in less than two days, in addition to their procedural and technical voting operations training.
Cost is a significant deterrent to providing thorough training.
However, the ultimate costs of even a very few voting stations where there are significant procedural or management irregularities can be significantly greater than any apparent savings made in training. Training Session Organisation Organisation and effectiveness of training sessions is considerably enhanced if the session is broken down into specific planned modules. Free-form sessions can too easily fail to cover the subject matter or group activities required and thus fail to achieve the session objectives. Adequate rest breaks are important for maintaining participants' attention. Where sessions are being conducted at night, the needs, energy, and attention limits of those participants who have been working on other tasks during the day need to be considered in structuring the session content and determining its length.