As someone who has spent the past 25 years in learning and development, designing training programs, running train-the-trainer sessions, and coaching subject matter experts through their first (and fiftieth) time in front of a room, I’ve noticed the same pattern over and over: the person who knows the most about a topic is rarely, by default, the person best equipped to teach it. That’s not a knock on subject matter experts. It’s just a different skill.
I’ve seen this play out time and again, in all kinds of organizations, handing training off to people who were brilliant at their jobs and had never been asked to teach before. The pattern holds every time.
I first wrote about this years ago, an idea I called the “X-factor” in my book, What’s Your Formula?, and later expanded on for TD magazine. Since then, I’ve kept refining the tools I use to help organizations figure out where their trainers and subject matter experts actually stand, and how to help them close the gap between what they know and what they can teach.
Three things make the difference:
- A diagnostic tool for figuring out where someone falls on the trainer skills spectrum,
- A model for understanding how people actually learn, and
- A four-step framework for designing any training session so it sticks.
If you’re a subject matter expert who’s been asked to train other people, or you support SMEs who are in such a position, consider this the crash course I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago.
Presenting Information Is Not the Same as Training Someone
Before I started Endurance Learning, I led the training function for the world’s largest eye bank. Part of that job meant attending medical conferences and symposia where surgeons would get up, present their research, and share their findings with colleagues. Those sessions were interesting, and some of the research and breakthroughs they shared were truly amazing. But they were simply sharing information; they weren’t training.
A training session asks something different of the person in front of the room. It’s not enough to hand over information and trust that people absorb it. Training means helping people walk away able to do something new, differently, or better than they could before. That distinction, sharing information versus upskilling people, is at the heart of everything below.
Most people’s business cards do not say “subject matter expert.” People are hired and paid to do something specific, such as an engineer, nurse, operations lead, or accountant, and only sometimes are they also asked to train other people in that specialty. That’s worth keeping in mind, because it reframes the whole problem. When someone is a poor trainer, it’s not usually a character flaw or a lack of effort. It’s that they were never actually hired or trained to teach. They were hired to be excellent at their job, and being excellent at a job and being able to teach it to someone else draw on very different muscles.
There is a real upside to working with subject matter experts as trainers, too, and it’s worth naming plainly: they bring credibility, real stories, and depth that an outside trainer often can’t fake. The challenge isn’t their expertise. The challenge is that this deep expertise and passion can create a blind spot. When you’ve lived inside a topic for years, it’s easy to assume everyone else shares your context, your urgency, or your passion for it. Usually they don’t. That’s the lens a trainer has to learn to see past.
The Four Quadrants of the Trainer Skills Profile
Since I first started playing with this idea in a 2×2 matrix years ago, my team at Endurance Learning and I have refined it into a self-assessment we call the Trainer Skills Profile. It maps two things against each other: how much someone knows about their content, and how skilled they are at facilitating a learning experience. The Trainer Skills Profile includes things like checking for understanding, reading the room, running an activity, and adjusting on the fly.
Plot those two scores on a graph and you land in one of four quadrants:
Quadrant A: The Messenger (low content knowledge, low facilitation skill) This is the person who’s been handed a message and asked to deliver it, often without much choice in the matter. Perhaps it’s someone filling in at the last minute, or an HR generalist covering topics outside their specialty during new employee orientation. They may not have deep expertise or a facilitator’s toolkit, but they’re doing their best to get information across.
If you’re designing training for someone in this quadrant, keep the content simple, lean on job aids and reference sheets, and don’t expect them to run activities or field detailed follow-up questions. When designing for trainers in Quadrant A, be sure to equip the trainer with plenty of resources they can point people to if they have deeper questions.
Quadrant B: The Scholar (high content knowledge, low facilitation skill) This is the classic subject matter expert, a trainer who is deeply knowledgeable, often genuinely passionate, and focused on getting information into people’s hands. The risk here is a session that turns into an hour of lecture, with little room for the audience to check whether they actually absorbed anything. If you’re designing for someone in this quadrant, structure their stories for them, build in natural pause points for audience questions, and don’t ask them to improvise a facilitated discussion or activities on the fly; give them a script for that part.
Quadrant C: The Navigator (high content knowledge, high facilitation skill) This is the sweet spot: someone who knows the material deeply and knows how to modulate their delivery, check for understanding, and balance the task of covering information with the process of actually helping people learn it. If you’re designing for someone in this quadrant, you have room to build in real activities, case studies, and open-ended discussion, trusting that they can facilitate engaging and meaningful activities while still answering the tough content questions.
Quadrant D: The Coach (low content knowledge, high facilitation skill) This is often where professional trainers and facilitators land when they’re outside their specialty. They’re skilled at running a room, asking good questions, and turning things back to the group, but not always equipped to answer detailed technical questions. If you’re designing for someone in this quadrant, make sure a subject matter expert is available (even just on standby) to field content questions, and give the facilitator strong reference materials to lean on.
None of these quadrants is a life sentence. Where you land is often situational; you might be a confident “Navigator” on a topic you’ve taught for a decade, and a nervous “Messenger” the moment you’re handed something brand new. I’ve seen the same person show up as a “Scholar” on their own specialty and a “Messenger” the moment they’re asked to cover something just outside it. The Trainer Skills Profile isn’t meant to label people; it’s meant to help you diagnose what kind of support a specific training session needs.
Take the Trainer Skills Profile Assessment
Want to find out where you land? The Trainer Skills Profile is a short self-assessment built around two sets of statements: one covering your content knowledge on a topic, the other covering your facilitation practice. For each statement, you rate yourself on a simple scale from Never to Always, thinking honestly about how you actually behave in a real session, not how you’d like to behave.
Once you’ve rated every statement, each set adds up to its own score: a Content Knowledge score and a Facilitation Practice score. Plot those two scores against each other — Content Knowledge on the horizontal axis, Facilitation Practice on the vertical axis — and wherever they intersect is where you land on the matrix: Messenger, Scholar, Navigator, or Coach.
Developing Complementary Skills Between Subject Matter Experts and Facilitators
One quick note on Quadrant B and D: the obvious fix when someone finds themself in the Scholar quadrant is to pair them with a Coach. Let the SME handle content, let the facilitator handle the room. That works as a short-term patch. But the better long-term move isn’t a clean division of labor; it’s a little cross-training in both directions: the SME picks up some facilitation skill, the facilitator picks up some working knowledge of the content. The two skill sets are meant to complement each other, not replace each other.
What Are the Essential Skills Needed for a Professional Trainer?
Boiled down, an effective trainer needs strength in four areas, and very few people start out strong in all of them:
- Content mastery: Deep enough knowledge of the subject to answer unscripted questions and adapt on the fly, not just recite prepared material.
- Physical Presence: Intentional use of body language and vocal cues to establish trust and credibility with the learners.
- Ownership: Appropriate personalization of the training content to ensure authenticity without compromising the actual learning outcomes.
- Results: Designing and/or delivering a session that gives learners the space and opportunity to actively demonstrate that they understand and can apply the material.
Most people are naturally strong in one or two of these areas and weak in the others. That’s exactly what the Trainer Skills Profile is built to diagnose. When a trainer is made aware of the concept of “Results”, it becomes a skill that is learnable by anyone regardless of which quadrant they start in, and it’s often the highest-leverage place to invest first.
The Four Stages of Competence: How Adults Learn a New Skill
Understanding where someone stands as a trainer is only half the picture. The other half is understanding how their learners actually absorb something new, because how you present information directly shapes whether people are motivated to close their own knowledge gaps.
The model I rely on for this goes back further than most people expect. In 1969, management trainer Martin Broadwell published “Teaching for Learning,” an article describing four stages people move through as they develop a new skill, in the context of effective teaching in religious instruction. In the 1970s, management and training practitioners picked up the framework and adapted it for the workplace. It’s held up remarkably well, and I still think it’s one of the clearest ways to explain why some training lands and some doesn’t.
The four stages of competence are:
- Unconscious incompetence: You don’t know what you don’t know. This is often where learners start, and it’s not a comfortable place for a trainer to leave them, because a session that doesn’t help people recognize a gap exists is a session that won’t motivate them to close it.
- Conscious incompetence: You’ve realized there’s a gap. This is uncomfortable, but it’s progress. You now know something’s missing, even if you don’t yet know what to do about it.
- Conscious competence: You’re actively developing the skill, and it takes deliberate effort and attention to execute it.
- Unconscious competence: The skill has become automatic. You can do it without having to think hard about every step.
Most training sessions are far too short to move someone all the way to unconscious competence. That would be a transformation that takes real repetition, over real time. But every training session should be designed to move people at least from not knowing what they don’t know, to consciously working on the gap. That’s the job.
Setting Clear Training Outcomes Before You Design a Session
Before designing any session, there are exactly two things you have to nail down.
First, decide the outcome. Finish this sentence: By the end of this session, my learners will be able to show me that they can ___. Notice that sentence isn’t about what you’re going to cover; it’s about what your learner will be able to do. That reframing matters enormously. “I’m going to teach people about X” is a statement about you. “My learners will be able to show me that they can do Y” is a statement about them, and it’s the only one that actually defines success.
Second, walk learners through a four-step progression to get them there. That’s the framework below.
Endurance Learning’s Training Design Framework: SWAP (Spark, What, Action, Persist(s))
This is the part of the model I get the most animated about, because I’ve watched it go wrong the same way, over and over, in train-the-trainer sessions I’ve run. Subject matter experts are handed this training design framework; they nail the first two steps beautifully, and then they skip the third one entirely. That’s exactly the step that determines whether the training actually worked. (Please note, this framework is an evolution of our thinking that for us has replaced 4 steps previously known as Anchor, Content, Application, and Future Use).
I go into this in more detail in Endurance Learning’s Activity Cookbook.
1. Spark
Don’t assume your learners already understand why the topic matters, or why you’re passionate about it. The Spark step “primes the pump”; it’s meant to capture the attention and imagination of your learners. It connects people to the material before you start delivering it. A few simple ways to do this:
- Open with a question (“How many of you have ever…?”)
- Tell a story that makes the stakes real
- Ask people to turn to a neighbor and share what they already know
- Paint a picture of what’s possible if the group solves this problem together
You don’t need to do all four. Pick one. It doesn’t need to be complicated; it just needs to get people leaning in before you start talking.
2. What
The “What” is the step subject matter experts are usually already excellent at, whether it comes in lecture form, a demonstration, or some other explanation of the content. It matters, but it’s rarely the part that needs the most design help.
3. Action
The “Action” step often gets skipped, and it’s the only point in a session where you can actually tell whether your learners understood anything. I ran into this again just this week, in a virtual train-the-trainer session. We’d given a group of subject matter experts everything they needed, from a strong spark to solid content, and we even provided some activity ideas for the action step.
When it came time for their teach-backs, almost every one of them nailed the opening and delivered the content well. Then, almost without exception, they skipped straight past any sort of action, from quick discussion points to activity instructions that actually appeared on their slides. When I asked how they’d know their learners actually got it, the answers I got back were things like “they were nodding along” or “they seemed to be following and giving me eye contact.” One person said: “They didn’t ask anything when I asked if there were any questions.”
That doesn’t confirm comprehension; it just confirms someone was awake. Nodding heads and eye contact don’t tell you whether someone learned anything; they just tell you the room was polite.
Simple ways to check for real action:
- Ask a multiple-choice-style question and have people respond visibly (colored note cards, a live poll, a show of hands)
- Give people a case study or real scenario and have them work through it
- Have small groups discuss a question and report back
- Write down what participants say on a flip chart; it validates their contribution and encourages more participation
It’s worth being precise about what “action” means here. Asking a question checks comprehension, whether someone understood what was said. A higher-level “action” step means giving someone a chance to actually use the new information in something resembling a real situation. Both have their place, and which one you use depends on how much time you have and what you’re actually trying to accomplish. But skipping both is what leads to learners who nod along in the room and then come back with the exact same questions two weeks later.
4. Persist(s)
People will not walk away having memorized everything you covered, so plan for that instead of hoping around it. The most reliable “Persist” tool is a job aid: something concise that a learner can return to later, without needing to remember the whole session. This is the same principle behind our own **”Going Beyond the Lecture”** job aid — a one-page worksheet that walks a trainer through defining their outcome and choosing one technique for each of these four steps. Other lightweight options:
- “What’s one thing you’ll try on Monday?”
- Start / Stop / Continue: What will you start doing? Stop doing? Keep doing, because it’s already working?
How to Improve Facilitation Techniques for Engaging Adult Learners
Most of the techniques mentioned in the previous section are also useful here since engagement and action are so closely linked. A few principles worth calling out on their own:
- Respect what adults already bring to the room. Adult learners arrive with real experience; acknowledge it and build on it, rather than presenting as if they’re blank slates.
- Make the “why” explicit before the “what.” This is the Spark step in practice. Adults disengage quickly when they don’t understand why something matters to their actual work.
- Replace “any questions?” with a real check. A targeted question, a quick poll, or a small-group discussion tells you far more about engagement than silence does.
- Give people something to do, not just something to hear. Action, which can come in the form of a scenario, a case study, or a chance to practice, is consistently the highest-leverage lever for engagement, and the one most often skipped.
- Vary your delivery deliberately. Tone, pacing, movement, and pauses aren’t decoration; they’re tools for holding attention and signaling what matters most.
If you want a structured way to work on this, the Trainer Skills Profile’s facilitation practice questions are a good starting checklist. They’re built around exactly these behaviors.
A Trainer Skills Case Study: Diagnosing and Coaching a Subject Matter Expert
Here’s a composite example that captures a pattern I see constantly. Jordyn has worked in operations for twelve years and knows the core process better than anyone else on the team. Whenever a new hire joins, leadership asks Jordyn to “show them the ropes.” Jordyn takes it seriously. She builds lengthy slide decks that cover every step and every exception encountered over the years. During the session, Jordyn talks for the entire hour, worried that stopping to ask questions or run an activity will eat into the time needed to cover everything important.
A few weeks later, new hires are still making mistakes, and they keep coming back to Jordyn with the same questions. This is frustrating for Jordyn, who’s already invested so much time preparing.
Where does Jordyn land on the Trainer Skills Profile? Almost certainly Quadrant B (the Scholar). Deep expertise, real passion for the material, but a session built entirely around content delivery with no room for action. And notice: this isn’t a knowledge problem. Jordyn knows the material better than anyone. It’s a design problem, and a specific one: the Action step is missing entirely.
What’s the lowest-lift fix? A couple of options that don’t require Jordyn to redesign the whole session:
- Add one small Action moment. Even something as simple as a short scenario such as: “Here’s a situation you’ll likely run into in your first month; how would you handle it?”, gives Jordyn a chance to see, in the room, whether people actually absorbed the material, instead of finding out three weeks later.
- Add a Persist element. Jordyn has been fielding the same follow-up questions for years. Turning those into a simple FAQ document, handed out at the end of the session, gives new hires something to check before they come back to Jordyn with a question that’s already been answered.
Neither fix requires turning Jordyn into a professional instructional designer overnight. It requires adding one deliberate step to a session that’s otherwise full of real expertise.
How to Start Building Your Trainer Skills
If you’re a subject matter expert who’s been asked to train, or you support people who are, start by figuring out where you (or they) land on the Trainer Skills Profile. Then look at the last training session you ran and ask honestly: Did it include a real Action step, or did it stop at the “What” and hope for the best?
I’ve watched this exact gap play out for 25 years, and the fix is almost never “become a better presenter.” It’s designing one deliberate step into a session that’s already full of real expertise.
You can take the assessment yourself using our Trainer Skills Profile, a free tool that scores you on both content knowledge and facilitation practice and shows you exactly where you land on the matrix. We use the Trainer Skills Profile along with our Facilitator Evaluation Rubric when delivering our Train-the-Trainer sessions.
If you’re realizing you’ve got more than one Jordyn on your team, that’s exactly the kind of problem our Train-the-Trainer sessions are built to solve. Reach out, and let’s talk through it.
