Sometimes, as learning and development (L&D) professionals, we can get so consumed with evaluating and helping employees across our organizations that we forget to train our own L&D staff, trainers, or even ourselves.
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To ensure your L&D team comprises the best of the best across your industry and that your staff remains sharp and highly skilled, here are 10 tips and best practices you’ll want to consider executing.
1. Search for Specific Qualities in L&D and Trainer Candidates
As with any position, no amount of training can rectify a bad hire. So, make sure you’re searching for the following qualities in your L&D staff and trainers:
- Self-confident but humble attitudes
- Highly aware of themselves, others, and the environments they’re in
- Ability to fill in gaps in information, build bridges between new and old information, and organize information in easy-to-follow formats
- Desire to learn and try new things, especially when the material is challenging
- Capacity to be empathetic, flexible, and patient and to listen actively
- Aptitude for storytelling or engaging presentation skills
2. Reinforce How Training Is Different from Teaching
When developing your L&D staff, reinforce the idea that training and development is much different from teaching. Your staff should never consider themselves teachers. While teaching requires more passive, theoretical, indoctrination-type approaches, training and developing require more active, motivating, real-life, and hands-on approaches. Your staff should empower and motivate those employees they’re training so that those employees can do things on their own; they should not simply spout off theories and rules without offering opportunities for real-world application.
3. Consider Different Learning Styles and Methods
As you’re creating learning content and courses for your L&D staff, keep in mind that they’ll each have different learning styles and methods too—the same way the rest of your employees do. Some learners retain material better when they read documents, while others remember material better when they hear someone speaking. And others retain information best by doing what they’re attempting to learn themselves. Make sure you have learning materials available for each type of learning style. Read “Understanding Different Learning Styles in the Workplace” for more details about this.
4. Set Learning Objectives and SMART Goals for L&D Staff and Trainers
When developing your L&D teams, make sure that you are still setting concrete goals and learning objectives per each course and piece of learning material each employee encounters. Otherwise, you won’t see results from your staff, and they will not remained engaged.
In addition, consider setting SMART goals for your L&D staff and trainers so that they have a real sense of purpose and direction while they’re completing their everyday tasks. SMART goals are specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound goals.
In tomorrow’s post, we’ll cover the six additional tips and best practices you’ll want to consider executing when training and developing your L&D team.