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Now, Go Do It: To Be an Effective Trainer, You Must Train
Every good training class, every good presentation, and every good book has a call to action. This is your call to action. The principles in this book apply globally. Whether you are teaching in your hometown to local students or halfway around the globe in a foreign language, these principles will help make you an effective trainer. But they will only help if you go do it. To be an effective trainer, you must be a trainer. Just like your students, who must install your product in order to be an effective installer, or sell your product in order to be an effective seller, you must teach in order to be an effective instructor.
Two things make a great instructor: a love for learning and a love for people. Notice that I did not say a love for teaching is required. That is secondary. I hope that a love for teaching will come, but it is not required in order to be a good instructor.
When you combine a love for learning with a love for people, the result is a love for seeing others learn. When that learning makes a difference, you have become an effective instructor.
This book is just a step in the right direction. Create a plan that will increase your effectiveness as a trainer and keep you improving. Define your approach develop with a strategy, design with a structure, and then go out and deliver with a purpose.
Define Your Approach
DO Articulate How You Will Make Learning Effective
Can you articulate the philosophy of learning that guides all of the training you do? Can you state how and why your training works? The first step toward being a consistently effective instructor is being able to articulate why you are effective.
DO Emphasize Proficiency over Knowledge
Your documented approach does not have to be long or deep. It merely needs to reflect that your students will learn by doing—by putting into practice and demonstrating the objectives you want them to complete. Knowledge is important, and you can make it even more important by making it actionable. Only when students turn knowledge into action will the knowledge become valuable to them and to your company.
DO Become Consciously Skilled on Your Products
The “secret sauce” that makes product experts that can teach others so valuable to a company is that they know what they know about their products and know why they know them. Being able to perform tasks with your product without even thinking about it makes you a great employee and subject matter expert. Being able to perform those same tasks and explain everything you are doing makes you a great instructor.
DO Identify Students That Are Ready to Learn
Make a conscious effort to identify the right students for each course you teach. Set yourself up for success by teaching the right people the right things. When you are preparing to provide training, ask enough questions to make sure you understand the audience and what will make them willing and ready to learn from you.
Develop with a Strategy
DO Demonstrate the Value of Training
Effective training is one of the most powerful tools a company has to increase revenue, avoid costs, or improve services. Make sure your training does that, and make sure you can demonstrate it.
DO Improve Your Training from Good to Great
Start with the list in Chapter 6 and build on it. You know your product, your customers, your industry, yourself, and your company. Be systematic in your approach to improve each training class. Great is limitless. Effective is not a destination that you reach to find rest. You can always improve, always get better, and always be a little more awesome.
DO Inspect and Evaluate Your Training
If you are always going to be improving, you must always be inspecting, or evaluating. Just as your product improves by getting feedback from your customers and others, so does your training improve through good feedback. Ask questions that you can act on and from which you can learn. Make your evaluations meaningful.
Design with a Structure
DO Dethrone King Content
Content is too important to put first. Make it even more powerful by letting it serve learning.
DO Use the 4 × 8 Proficiency Design Model
Use any model that helps you properly evaluate the business goals, audience, objectives, and learning activities before creating the content. Your content will become more powerful as a result.
DO Build Engaging Content and Deliverables
Use the right tools to deliver your content. PowerPoint slides are effective as a visual aid when facilitating a training class, but PowerPoint wasn’t designed for instructors to deliver content by reading it like a book. Create your student guides and handouts to engage your students and keep them active in their learning process.
Deliver with a Purpose
DO Speak Up
Continuously improve your public speaking skills. Don’t allow a fear of public speaking to keep you from facilitating, but don’t let facilitating keep you from improving your public speaking skills either. Work on both decorative and declarative speaking, with the goal of being an even better instructor.
DO Shut Up and Listen to Your Students
Involving your students in their own learning requires listening to them. Ask them questions, let them answer questions, watch them learn, and watch them perform. Observe them for true learning. When they aren’t absorbing it, slow down and say it again. Teaching requires a two‐way conversation and two‐way conversations require listening.
DO Stand Up and Be Confident
Demonstrate poise and control of your classroom. Have fun and look like you’re having fun! You are in control and you are the expert. There is nothing to fear and your students will appreciate your confidence. Confidence is not egotistical. You can still be humble and confident, and you should be. Students will learn more from an instructor that confidently says “I don’t know” than from the one who timidly makes up an answer.
DO Prepare for Difficult Students and Circumstances
You will have difficult students. Prepare for them. How you handle difficult students and circumstances can be the difference between effective and ineffective.
DO Deliver Effective Virtual Training
Bringing proficiency learning to a virtual setting is challenging but rewarding. Stretch yourself to try new techniques or tools, especially when the goal is training and not presenting.
DO Deliver Effective Technical Presentations
Delivering information and increasing one’s knowledge about a topic—and doing it well—is still important. Don’t assume that hands‐on learning means you don’t have to be an effective presenter. Just be certain whether a presentation is what is needed. Don’t offer training when a presentation would be more effective and don’t create a technical presentation when you want to change a skill.
DO Allow for Flexibility When Training in Other Cultures
There are company cultures, geographic cultures, and country cultures—all kinds of cultures in which you may have the opportunity to experience and teach. Embrace the opportunity, allowing for some flexibility as you do so. Demonstrate an understanding for people and a desire for them to internalize the training by making it easy for them to associate with in their context and culture.
Don’t Forget the Details
DO Define Certification Properly
Prepare a list of requirements for certification. This will help you define it properly—and help others understand the difference between a certificate course and a certification course.
DO Manage the Details Properly
Behind every effective training program is an administration process that helps trainers and managers measure success, maintain consistency, and track students and instructors. The details are important to get right. It is necessary to know what must be tracked and define a plan that works for you and your company.
DO Mentor New Employees
Mentoring can be a key factor in the success of a product training program. Mentoring provides an opportunity for subject matter experts to make a difference in the life and career of a new or junior employee. When careful attention is paid to attitudes and outcomes, it can be a powerful program that benefits the mentor, the mentoree, and the company.
Conclusion
If you do all of these things, you will be well on your way to becoming proficient in delivering proficiency. You cannot be proficient in something you don’t do. Practice, practice, practice. You will find, as I still do, that you will get better every time you teach. The goal of practice is to improve one’s default abilities. Even the best instructors will fall back into their default comfort zone under less‐than‐perfect circumstances. Only effective practice can ensure that your default comfort zone is an effective training ability.
As you help to increase your students’ value by improving what they can do with your product, you will have fun and you yourself will become a better employee in the process. The personal rewards for you are endless. You, too, will become more valuable to your company as you demonstrate an ability to navigate the process of transferring your knowledge to others.
You will find that little is as rewarding as seeing people change the way they do things because of your teaching. You may want to keep practicing to continue training. You may even want to become a professional trainer. Because, when you follow the principles in this book and practice them diligently, you will discover that you DO deliver effective learning.
Making It Practical
Your students invest time and money to learn from you. It is only worth it if your teaching changes what they DO. In the same way, you have invested in reading this book. It is only worth it if you go out and DO something differently. Do not try to do too much at once. Set a goal and prioritize your action items.
- List at least one thing from each of the 20 items listed in this chapter and choose one of them to improve on next time you teach.
- Prioritize the list above. Pick one that you will start working on today.