How to Design Train the Trainer Courses and Train the Trainer Training Materials to Maximise Learning

These days you can get trained on just about any skill. If you wish to draw, learn a new language, learn how to use a software suit such as power point or even become a better manager, there are a variety of courses that people can attend to. These courses are thought by trainers whose job is to transfer specific skills to their course attendees. The ability to train others is also an important skill in addition to knowing the subject matter, whether soft skills or technical skills. Train the trainer courses are designed to cater for this need. This article explores what you, as a trainer, should look for in such training courses to get the best from them.

A train a trainer course is a “meta course”. In a sense, the course itself should be an example of how training is done properly and transfer that skill to the would-be trainers. Any training company that offers such a course must be well-experienced in the art of training with years of experience in various fields behind them, in particular on soft skills training. The ability to train others is a soft skill and trainers who aim to run train the trainer courses on soft skills would significantly benefit from attending general soft skills courses to become better at communication skills, emotional intelligence, handling difficult people, body language and so on. There are various training resources available online for this.

An ideal train the trainer course or training courseware should rely on the principles of accelerated learning and experiential learning. The aim of accelerated learning is to maximise knowledge transfer in a given time and help learners to memorise the skills during the course as best as they can. There are a number of areas that such a course or courseware must consider:

• Learners learn better when they are immersed in the subject matter.
• Practical exercises help the learners to quickly put what they learn into practice and learn the skills during the course.
• Memory exercises help delegates to memorise multi-step techniques during the course.
• Trainers must take advantage of the huge power of our brains by throwing as much information as they can, effectively bombarding the students with useful materials. Studies show that we are very good at absorbing a lot of content in parallel in a given time so long as the content is given to us in a logical and meaningful manner.
• The trainers should setup specific objectives so learners know “what is in it for them”.
• Trainer should consider multiple intelligence theory and present the content in a variety of ways to appeal to different capabilities.
• Trainers should learn about body language so they can read and also influence the participants beyond using just words.

Implementing the above in a train the trainer course is not necessarily a straight forward job. It requires a lot of experimentation and trial and error to eventually come up with the appropriate “meta-content” that can help to train the delegates on the art of training others.

For example, one of the critical methods is the use of question/answer in training as opposed to lecturing. Many teachers and trainers neglect this principle and go on to “preach” their delegates about a particular way of doing something or in case of soft skills courses, interacting with others. Unfortunately studies show that this style of preaching has very little value as learners will quickly forget the content after the course. Trainer notes must reflect this and contain question/answer comments to help trainer deliver a more interactive and useful course.

In a train the trainer course, a trainer must use the same question/answer technique to teach the delegates about the importance of asking questions. This way, not only delegates learn the technique, but they can also see how it works in practice as the technique is used directly on them. Over the course of the training, they start to understand the effectiveness of the new skill and they can easily remember various parts of the course and see how each method helps them to learn.

Good corporate training courses based on accelerated learning are usually densely packed and the initial reaction at the beginning of the course is to think that there is simply too much material to cover. Most learners think that they are not capable of learning so much in a given time, simply because they rely on their previous experience based on old-fashioned style of learning. What they don’t know is that the old methods of lecture-based training can be awfully slow in properly teaching a particular skill. Usually by the end of a training course, delegates start to rapidly build up their confidence in the subject matter and become amazed on how much they can learn in a short time. Training games and online training resources can be quite helpful on this.

In a train the trainer course, this fundamental discovery usually produces significant mentality shift as learners realise how quickly they have become competent in a particular skill and also at the same time how they can start applying this technique to their own courses to maximise their efficiency.

A great way to understand what a train the trainer courses contains is to obtain Train the Trainer Training Materials such as those provided in the resource box below. The train the trainer training courseware contains all the training resources a trainer needs to run a course including power point slides, workbooks, exercises, trainer notes, trainer scripts, handouts, training games and so on.