Companies spend a lot of time and resources on training efforts. In the United States alone, companies spend close to $90 billion annually on training costs, including payroll expenses and external products and services.
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Given that significant expenditure, doesn’t it make sense to do that training well? Unfortunately, many training programs are ineffective for a variety of reasons. An ineffective trainer is often the key culprit.
Here, we discuss two necessary elements of truly effective trainers: They must be both engaging and knowledgeable.
Engaging
There are many factors that go into being an effective public speaker, and these are directly applicable to trainers. Trainers don’t necessarily have to be world-class showmen to keep audiences engaged. But they do need to be able to present material in a way that resonates with the audience.
This means they need to convey the relevance of the topic and its value to the audience. In this way, trainers must be able to read the audience, make connections between the material and the real-life experiences of the audience, and simply speak authoritatively and with emotion and inflection.
Knowledgeable
The second part of the training equation is knowledge of and experience with the subject matter. A trainer could be the greatest public speaker in the world but won’t be effective if he or she doesn’t have anything useful to convey to the audience. Trainers need to understand the challenges their audiences face, as well as industry and organizational best practices for addressing those challenges.
One challenge for organizations is that the most knowledgeable staff aren’t necessarily the most engaging—and, the most engaging presenters aren’t necessarily knowledgeable. But it’s not necessary for a trainer to be the most knowledgeable and the most engaging to be effective.
For example, companies can work with excellent presenters to make them reasonably adept in the subject matter or with internal experts to help develop their presentation skills.
Training expenditures are wasted if training fails to reach employees and convey useful information. This means that trainers need to both be engaging and have the knowledge, experience, and ability to convey useful information. These are two critical elements when selecting those who will deliver training to your staff members.