Who is a training facilitator

Read more articles about Training Development and Facilitation Skills. Guila Muir is the premiere trainer of trainers, facilitators, and presenters on the West Coast of the United States. Since , she has helped thousands of professionals improve their training, facilitation, and presentation skills. Find out how she can help transform you from a boring expert to a great presenter: www. Are You a Facilitator or Trainer? The Myth of the Facilitator. What would you say is the difference between an Instructional System Designer and a Training.

What I've noticed in our industry is that ISD professionals are usually responsible for designing training programs that consist of several courses. They are more like school administrators.

Whereas, training professionals are instructors. They are more like teachers. ISD professionals, at least in the corporate world, are usually paid more. I'd like to know your thoughts. ISD professionals are like architects, but most use a pretty standard approach to how they build their houses. They do NOT have to be content experts. Because they are not, they must spend a lot of time gathering information from subject matter experts and other stakeholders so that they can build a relevant training.

Most trainers don't have a clue how to design a training effectively. That's a HUGE missing link. If they knew more, they'd be better trainers. This is a great article outlining the differences between a facilitator and a trainer. Despite a common goal of increased sales, their frames of reference are very different. What seems reasonable to one may place too many demands on another. And interpersonal communication styles are likely to be quite different as well. Groups face other issues as well including clarifying roles for projects that have not been done before, resolving high-stakes conflicts, etc.

In situations like these, groups will make better decisions if they embrace a facilitative mind and skill set to support them to do their best thinking.

This is often accomplished by preparing a facilitator guide to help the meeting leader when facilitating a meeting and by applying fundamental group facilitation skills. Training and facilitating are two different activities. They require some of the same skills, and some different skills. A trainer is often a content expert, while a facilitator is a process expert.

A meeting facilitator leads discussions and helps participants learn from their own experiences and shared information. The trainer might lead a discussion about course content; a facilitator will focus more on the process of a discussion. Facilitation skills training often includes training skills. Which of these two roles do YOU play more frequently in your organization: team facilitator or team trainer? Although facilitator jobs vary in focus, there are ten key facilitation techniques all skilled facilitators use to manage the group process:.

How many of these skills do you use when facilitating meetings? Which could you add to make your group facilitation more effective? There are some things skilled facilitators expressly do not do when facilitating meetings. Consider the negative impact on your group and the process if you, as the facilitator …. A discussion is primarily an exchange of opinions and feelings, and of facts secondarily. Successful discussions include listening to others. Begin to sense how much easier and yet more effective a facilitator could be if someone else coordinated the room, participants, supplies.

If someone else provided a detailed agenda with the activities to launch and questions to ask. If someone else managed the documentation at the end of it all. In fact, as facilitator, you could facilitate a planning workshop in the morning for one group, at one facility, and a user experience workshop, in a different facility, for a different group in the afternoon. And you could do so effectively if the responsibilities of the coordinator, meeting designer, and documenter are managed properly.

PMI identified three key skills that needed to be improved in project managers. Specifically, they referenced improvement that needs to be made in:.

The principles and practice of facilitating , rather than preaching, provide the most effective means to establish clear messaging. Therefore, listening and observing are essential to speaker success.

Statistically, approximately 25 percent of its pages indicate the need, reference, or link to the importance of facilitation. Multiple sources sing the praise and importance of effective facilitation. Yet what real skills are required and are they shared equally across all meeting types? For this unique assessment, we took our own Professional Facilitation curriculum and compared it with.

The combined result below compares 25 structured facilitator skills and scores the importance of each against the four types of facilitation. Structured facilitator training best supports business facilitation, followed by conflict negotiation, and finally community facilitation and instruction of various types as shown in the chart below.

For each skill, we force ranked distribution from Low to High and intentionally prevented repeating the same score. Next, we converted the PowerBalls to numeric values from 5-High to 1-Low to create a total score that shows the impact of the skills across the four meeting types. Not surprisingly, structured facilitator training and skills are needed most for Business Facilitation followed by Community Facilitation, Conflict Mediation, and then Instructional meeting or training situations.

Facilitator Training Skills. NOTE: Some skills for mediation and instruction may not be included because they have nominal impact on structured facilitator training. For example:. Within consensus-building and decision-making situations, structured facilitator training proves to substantially help groups get more done, faster. For optimal facilitator training, begin with understanding the four roles of effective facilitation, namely coordinator, documenter, meeting designer, and facilitator.

If you are facilitating business meetings and want to improve your effectiveness, strive to improve your structured facilitator skills. Above all, your investment in facilitator training will pay for itself many times over. Therefore, register for a class or forward this to someone who should. Each student thoroughly practices and rehearses tools, methods, and approaches throughout the week.

While some call this immersion, we call it the road to building impactful facilitation skills. See individual class descriptions for details.