Build your in-house capability.
Many organisations naturally want to deliver as much of their L&D as they can in-house. This saves cost and there are usually benefits associated with having learning experiences delivered by people who know the company and culture well. But does your L&D or HR team have the capability in facilitation and/or learning design?
When we are asked to support with some sort of train-the-trainer of L&D / HR Business Partner development, the work usually fits into one of two categories: learning to deliver a specific programme or overall skills development.
Learning to deliver a programme
This is the more traditional reason for a train-the-trainer: we have designed something and you need your facilitators to learn how to deliver it in-house.
We’ll build a workshop that helps your facilitators experience the content for themselves, explore the fundamentals required for delivering this well and then have a go at running it.
We can also provide detailed facilitator guides and materials to make your facilitators’ lives easier when it comes to delivering the content. Many of our clients choose to have us on-hand for the first round of delivery, either on-site to co-facilitate, or over the phone to offer support or run action-learning sets with the group of facilitators, sharing learning points from their experiences.
Overall skills development
More broadly speaking, who develops the developers? So often L&D teams or HRBPs who get involved in facilitation have never been fully developed themselves in the specific skills of facilitation. There is a big difference between saying someone is an expert on a topic, that this person is a great trainer on that topic and indeed to say that they are a good facilitator on that topic.
We help professionals in this space understand the difference between expertise, training and facilitation as follows:
Expertise means you know how to do it.
Training means you know how to explain or show others how to do it.
Facilitation means you have the skills to enable and empower others to find their own ways of doing this, loosely using your expertise to guide when required.
We then develop those skills according to what is most needed in the business. On occasion we are also asked to develop the L&D team in their ability to understand a business need, define success and then design their own learning content in-house.
However you want your L&D team and HR function to develop, we can help by simply starting with the great question: what do you want them to be doing that they are not doing now?