Coaching
ADD CPR to your
BY JOHN McKINSTRY
If you had to make a list of the skills which you believe a trainer needs in order to be a success what would YOUR top three be?
At a recent event I was asked this very question by a manager who told me that none of the staff in his organisation who delivered training were actually trainers.
Instead of having people who were trained to deliver training sessions what he had instead were people who were basically subject matter experts (the ones who – in his words – “knew that little bit more” than their colleagues) but who didn’t necessarily know how to transmit that knowledge to others.
He seemed surprised when I suggested that people running training sessions needed to be taught how to do so (and needed the opportunity to have their skills assessed and built up over time). In his view the only thing a trainer needed was to know “that little bit more” than his or her audience.
I have absolutely no issue with the notion that trainers should know more than their intended audience (as a firm believer in always being as prepared as possible for a session I try to learn as much as I can about my subject as a matter of course).
But is that it? Is THAT all you need to be a trainer?
What do you think?
What would you put down as your top three skills or tools that you need to have in your tool kit to be a truly effective trainer?
The top three items I can (and do) recommend that any trainer has are what I call “CPR” – Confidence, Positivity and Resilience.
Why these three?
Well just imagine for a moment what it would be like to sit through a training session run by someone who LACKED these qualities.
36 | TRAINING MAGAZINE EUROPE APRIL 2015
TRaining SESSIONS