10 Essential Trainer Skills You Need to Develop

Like everyone else, trainers need to continually develop their trainer skills. Without proper development, your trainers can fall behind on the latest L&D trends and fail to support your teams on their growth journey. We’ve listed down the top 10 trainer skills your trainers should focus on:

What are trainer skills?

Trainers need a specific set of abilities and qualities that'll make them effective at teaching employees the necessary things they need on the job. These skills go beyond traditional teaching expertise like public speaking and presenting. Instead, they touch on all the skills that answer the questions: what does a trainer do and what makes a great trainer?

Trainers and L&D experts need problem-solving, management, communication, and design-thinking skills because they are creating curriculums with the company's mission and vision in mind. Trainers will be working with specific teams and managers that specialize in all kinds of fields so they need to be versatile and flexible.

So this list will cover a wide range of competencies that will ensure employee and company growth through specific skill set training!

1. Problem-Solving Skills

Problem-solving is a trainer skill that enables your trainers to recognize issues and fix them with logical, timely, and appropriate solutions. With problem-solving skills, they’ll be able to deal with a variety of obstacles or unpleasant circumstances during training sessions.

Additionally, your trainers will have an easier time identifying individual and common skills,  knowledge gaps, and knowing how to bridge them together. When they’re able to recognize common problems with your teams, they’ll be able to help you better plan out your training programs to fit their learning needs. Problem-solving skills will not only help your trainers during active learning sessions but also help make your development programs more effective.

SC Training (formerly EdApp) offers a great Problem Solver course to teach your trainers how to solve issues in a systematic and logical manner. This course highlights the necessity of innovative problem-solving. It also covers the many concepts and styles of creative problem solving, as well as the various sorts of decision-making for each circumstance. The great thing about this course is that your trainers can take them anywhere: on the desktop, mobile, or on tablet.

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2. Communication Skills

If there’s one thing trainers can’t be without, it’s their ability to communicate. Good communication skills allow them to clearly express what they want to say and communicate with whomever, while also taking into account the proper tone and delivery. Being fluent, straightforward, and easy-to-understand in communicating helps them efficiently train their trainees, as well as avoid miscommunications. Similarly, being able to effectively communicate ideas and viewpoints with trainees is critical in maintaining a constructive but pleasant atmosphere during training sessions, whether it’s in 1-1s or in large groups.

SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s Effective Communication course is designed to help your trainers enhance their training verbal communication skills, whether communicating directly, publicly, or online. Some of the topics included in this course are: revamping your communication skills, public speaking, communicate effectively, and connecting with others virtually. The course is completely free for them to take. There’s

3. Management Skills

As training facilitators, your trainers need to continually develop their management and interpersonal skills to facilitate training properly and better support their trainees. Management skills help your trainers propel activities forward to achieve their training objectives and offer an overall better training experience. Without this trainer skill, your training activities can get out of hand, leave your team without any takeaways, and at worst, cause arguments among trainees. 

Training of Trainers by SC Training (formerly EdApp) offers 5 microlessons that will develop your trainers’ management skills and tackle how to properly facilitate learning and development sessions. Since this course follows a microlearning format, your trainers won’t be overloaded with information. The content is chopped up into bite-sized chunks to help them digest the information and understand the lessons better.

4. Organizational Skills

Your team members might be asking themselves, what skills do you need to be a personal trainer? One of the most crucial skills in this list is organizational skills. As instructors or trainers, they’re tasked with coming up with an overall plan to conduct training programs. They’re required to deal with the nitty-gritty details of their learners’ training. They organize sessions, plan out activities, and search for courses that they could facilitate.

Trainers mustn’t only know how to structure the lessons in an interesting and practical manner. They also need to know how to keep their schedules organized, coordinate with the logistics of sessions (such as tables, chairs, AV equipment, etc.), and acquire permits, among others. After the training’s done, they need to plan out feedback and forum sessions to gauge whether or not the training was successful. All of these are why it’s important to train your trainers on their organizational skills.

5. Active Listening Skills

Active listening is a trainer skill that allows your trainers to pay complete attention to listen to their trainees without interrupting them and to answer their questions and concerns more meaningfully. By honing this skill, they’ll be able to effectively hear and understand their trainees’ concerns and demands. People who seek help need to feel validated about their issues, which is why an industry like learning and development must encourage active listening. This increases learner satisfaction and mastering listener skill-sets, which leads to a stronger sense of trust and better relationships with them.

To start developing this skill, your trainers can take SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s Active Listening course, which focuses on the basic concepts and challenges of active listening. It also includes various ways of improving communication with trainees. This course has active learning integrated into every lesson, which means your trainers are likely to remain engaged with learning from start to finish.

6. Time Management Skills

It can be easy to lose track of time when everyone’s having fun. But as a consequence, not everything ends up getting tackled during training sessions, or your trainers may forget to highlight key points in the process. Developing their time management skills will help them prevent these things from happening. 

Time management skill is the ability to spend time properly and productively. This can be accomplished by learning how to improve organization and prioritizing tasks and activities. Having time management skills can help trainers avoid feeling overwhelmed and get things done despite pressure and strict schedules. This also helps them to reduce distractions and procrastination. Aside from better prioritization and organization, time management teaches them to use technology that helps speed up their workflow.

With SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s The Ultimate Guide to Personal Productivity, your trainers will be able to use their own particular work styles and habits to maximize their time. They’ll be able to master time management and attention-to-detail strategies to help them ensure they stay on track and possibly even fit in more activities with the time they have.

7. Design Thinking Skills

Design thinking is more than simply a skill–; it introduces a completely new way of thinking and provides a variety of hands-on ways to assist trainers in implementing this new attitude. At the core of it, design thinking helps them develop a deep understanding of the way people think and work, be empathetic to different parties, and encourage continuing experimentation. When your trainers are adept at design thinking, they can also pass this knowledge on to their trainees, improving how your organization works.

Design thinking unlocks your trainers’ potential to innovate and think outside the box. It’s a trainer skill that seeks to help them understand their trainees, question assumptions about the techniques and strategies they teach, reframe problems into growth challenges, and provide unique ideas to what they teach that can be prototyped and tested. Its ultimate objective is to uncover alternate techniques and answers that aren’t immediately obvious based on your team’s current level of expertise. 

8. Emotional Intelligence Skills

Trainers are often thrown into high-stress situations, which can lead them to lose control of their emotions and get into arguments with people who challenge them. Developing their emotional intelligence skills can help mitigate this problem.

Emotional intelligence skills (EI) are described as the capacity to identify and manage emotions and those around you. Having EI helps your trainers grasp, use, and control their own emotions in a constructive way to relieve stress, communicate successfully, empathize with others, overcome problems, and diffuse conflict. It also helps them develop stronger connections, succeeding with training programs, and achieving their professional and personal objectives. It can also support them in connecting with their feelings by translating purpose into action and making educated judgments about what is most important to them when it comes to training.

9. Sensitivity Skills 

When dealing with different types of people, it’s important that your trainers are aware of how to properly interact with everyone, no matter their background or culture. Being a sensitive and good trainer means that they take into account the audience they’re talking to and make sure everyone feels heard and attended to. For example, if a training session is designed in a way that only a certain demographic learns, the rest of the trainees may feel left out or come out of the program with no key takeaways. Without sensitivity skills, your development programs can end up being a waste of time. Sensitivity soft-skills not only develop your trainers’ sense of empathy but also prevent them from accidentally making others feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.

SC Training (formerly EdApp) offers a variety of sensitivity skills training, such as Diversity and Inclusion, Handling Objections with Emotional Intelligence, equity training, and Giving and Receiving Feedback. These courses will help each of your team members understand the characteristics of a good trainer and how to become a better trainer overall. Ans the best part? They're all integrated with gamification to make learning more fun and engaging for your trainers.

10. Adaptability Skills

Trainers are met with all kinds of unexpected challenges and problems during their training programs. But, trainers with an adaptive mindset can easily adjust to changes or unforeseen events. Because every training session can be unpredictable, adaptability helps them be open to new or improved ideas, methods, and approaches. Apart from being adaptable to changes, another important aspect of adaptability is the capacity to accomplish and unlearn specific approaches and procedures in order to explore new possibilities. 

Get your trainers to take SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s Adaptability course to let them discover what adaptability means in the L&D space and how it can be applied to training challenges such as lack of equipment, low attendee turnout, and distractions. This training program will also briefly touch on other qualities of a trainer.

SC Training (formerly EdApp) is a mobile learning management system designed for today’s digital habits, delivering more engaging and effective micro-learning directly to learners anytime and anywhere.

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