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What are the necessary skills to be a good trainer?

Try this 10-point self-assessment!

Can you?

1. Actively listen without interrupting
2. Be flexible and responsive
3. Sense the mood of the group and work with it
4. Challenge underlying tensions or hidden feelings and bring them to the surface
5. Provide an atmosphere conducive to learning
6. Maintain control and direction and steer the group in a positive way
7. Involve all members of the group both outgoing and shy
8. Validate what group members say, support and encourage them
9. Deal constructively with difficult or disruptive group members
10. Use questioning and probing techniques effectively

These are just some of the more subtle aspects in which an effective trainer needs to be proficient. These skills can be learnt on our Train the Trainer training course.

REMEMBER- training is a skilled process. It can look easy but it isn’t! Trying to facilitate a group in the same way as chairing a meeting will not have the desired result and can cause many more problems than it solves!

Listening

Active listening is the key skill for a trainer.

You probably already know this (but sometimes it helps to be reminded!): Listening is very different from hearing. When we hear, the information may flow through our ears without really registering in the brain.

Listening has at least three different stages: hearing, interpreting, and recalling.

1. Hearing: the physical action of the sound on our ear
2. Interpreting: interpreting the message from the words that we hear, the tone and inflection of the voice, as well as the person’s facial expressions and body movements. We also make interpretations dependent upon our own experiences in life.
3. Recalling: registering the message and recalling it later in the conversation.

Active listening involves all three of these processes and means you need to:

1. Give your complete attention to the other person or people for a specific period of time
2. Forget any preoccupations you may have
3. Suspend your judgement about what they are saying
4. Listen to the feeling behind the words and reflect it to the group using phrases like ‘it sounds as if you are very angry about that…is that right?
5. Listen to the silence and what it means is it a comfortable or an angry silence?
6. Watch for any non-verbal clues from group members ; they will help let you know when someone is disinterested, shy, anxious, domineering, bored, angry, or open etc

Similar resources you may like

1. Planning training
2. Group development
3. Using experiential training methods
4. Facilitation
5. Feedback skills

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Active listening, train the trainer, Train the Trainer Course, Train the Trainer Training, Training skills

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This entry was posted by Heather Buckley on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Train the Trainer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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