This week, I’ve been in India working with a training colleague in preparation to roll out a new curriculum. This colleague is a novice trainer and her supervisor doesn’t have any training background. But the quality and effectiveness of the work of this colleague will have significant impact on the work of our entire global mission, and therefore it’s vital that she blossoms into a high quality training professional.
In order to focus our efforts to develop this colleague professionally, I developed a competency rubric by which we can rate her current level of training proficiency, create a development plan with several specific goals based on her needs, then work toward those goals.
To create this rubric, I wanted to capture the essence of what I feel are the top five most basic, fundamental, foundational competencies for anyone who trains. The five competencies I included in this rubric (which can be downloaded by clicking here) are:
- Presentation Skills
- Creativity
- Body Language
- Adult Learning Principles
- Subject Matter Expertise (if you download the rubric, you’ll see that this section is customized to the specific industry I’m working in – eye banking)
Getting Started
This is not a scientifically-developed list. It’s not intended to be. There are a lot of factors that will impact any facilitator’s ability to be effective (experience level, trainees’ supervisor support, policies/procedures in place that allow trainees to implement new skills and abilities when they return to their jobs after training, etc.). This list of factors can indeed be overwhelming, especially for someone new to the learning and development profession.
This list is simply intended to get a novice trainer focused on some of the key elements within their circle of influence (to borrow a term from Stephen Covey). It is a tool to establish a baseline of current skills, abilities, knowledge and behaviors. It is a tool I plan to use to identify performance gaps and establish specific goals.
What Do You Think?
If you find this rubric to be helpful in assessing your own current set of training skills and abilities, please use it… and then tell me how it works for you. If you feel there are more important, more basic, more foundational skills that trainers (especially novice trainers) should be focused on, I invite you to share those ideas in the comments section below.
