How can you select a trainer that would be the best fit for your employees’ learning needs?  

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -  Lao Tzu

The benefits of hiring the services of a good and reliable trainer are numerous. First, training can help your company close the gap between where you are now and your organisation's desired outcome. It can also help your company achieve your organisation's productivity target as well.

But before you can engage a trainer for your company, what are some traits you should look out for?

A good trainer should stimulate hearts and minds of the employees' by fulfilling their learning needs and making them more productive at their work. He or she would be responsible for preparing objectives, defining content, selecting and sequencing activities for a specific programme. A good trainer can not only help others learn about managing their knowledge and skills individually, but also learn how to work as a team. In addition, a good trainer also has a role of selling training and development viewpoints, learning packages, programme and services to target audiences.

Hence, there are some areas HR should look out for when selecting a trainer. Identifying a good trainer would depend on some of the following effective qualities:

• He or she should set the stage and create an environment conducive for learning and one that is non-threatening.
• The trainer should provide a clear focus and objectives before the start of the workshop.
• He or she should be able to draw out the best and excite participants. Sometimes trainers have a bag of metaphors, stories, acronyms, quotes, ice breakers and energisers that keeps the audience engaged and involved. The trainer should also relate with the participants using real and practical experiences and examples.
• There should be a two-way communication that allows a dialogue session and stimulates an interactive community. He or she should be accountable and be able to engage participative learning, taking into consideration the relevance to their needs.

Types of trainers you should stay away from

There are many types of trainers ranging from old, young, experienced, inexperienced, serious, funny, generalist and the specialist. One of crucial factors a good trainer should have is the ability to build rapport with the audience and not trigger a hostile or aggressive environment. However, some trainers make the mistake of having a lack of knowledge of the participants' needs, including any special requirements. Some areas to consider include:

The reputation of the training provider: This depends on the approving human resource manager or team leader. He has to conduct a thorough check on the trainer and ask for testimonies and past evaluation reports for similar training courses conducted.

One ineffective quality of trainers is being very authoritative. Trainers should not coerce participants to participate if they are reluctant to or have workshops where there is only a one-way instruction with no questions are allowed.

Beware of trainers who deal with the training in a highly theoretical approach. Training has to be fun and it is important to draw out the learning objectives for participants. A trainer who has a habit of utilising the word "I" instead of "We" might seem very individualistic versus the more collective approach.

Is the trainer sloppy? A trainer also needs to take pride and professionalism in what he does. You can see this through his investments in training equipment or any self-development, such as upgrading himself with courses that could improve his training work.

Researching for the best trainers

The most cost-effective way to find out about a trainer would be simply searching his or her profile on the internet e.g. Google, Twitter, ezine articles, YouTube, Facebook. You can get some of the trainer's past testimonies or completed training evaluation forms, or even watch past training videos on their websites.

Another effective way of researching a trainer's background is through an interview, or asking the trainer to do a mock-up presentation. Request for a one to two-hour observation of the trainer in action. Or alternatively, the trainer can, through a role-play in your interview session, market a course to the training provider. A guideline would be getting them to highlight the problems or concerns which require training. So he or she could list out the objectives, benefits, cost, teaching methodology and some learning outcomes for your company before you decide on the best trainer for your employees' needs.

As for picking a freelance trainer or one who is contracted to a training consultancy? This would be very subjective as some trainers would prefer stability and security. However, the freelance trainer would always be on his or her toes as the importance for him or he to be in peak performance would be higher. They would not want to have any mistakes that could jeopardise their career. It is more ideal to find trainers with a lot of passion and who are able and willing to share instead.

But there could be situations where freelance trainers might not give their 100% during workshops because they were not well-remunerated by the training companies. However, this is a rare occurrence.

The professional fees of trainers range vastly, from a few hundred dollars per day for rookie trainers to three to seven thousand dollars per day for highly experienced and qualified international trainers.

Always check whether the fees include profiling instruments, training materials, certificates and pre-post course meetings or the human resource manager may receive a rude shock when he sees the final invoice on his desk! As a general guide, training fees of S$5,000 and more per day for local trainers will be considered high.

Essentially, it is about investing HR's training dollars wisely when selecting the most suitable training partner for the company's needs, as it is important for every organisation to increase their sales and reduce their cost in strive for increasing the wealth of the shareholders.

Santhanaram Jayaram (Ram)

Senior consultant

Training Edge International

www.trainingedgeasia.com