Trainer Roles and Responsibilities

Your role as a trainer is to develop your participants so that they can perform safely and efficiently in the workplace. You’re not just creating or delivering training content – you’re also ensuring that the participants retain, and more importantly, use the information and skills that you provide them with. One of the keys to effective training is to create an environment where learners trust you to guide them in the learning process.

Learners should have the opportunity to actively participate and engage with your content through a mix of training methods such as group methods, lectures, activities, and case studies, just to name a few. You’re also responsible for facilitating the training within the allotted time and keeping the learners on track throughout your sessions.

As a trainer, you’ll quickly learn that all participants are not equal. This is the reason that you’ll need to be flexible and frequently adapt by using various teaching methods.

It’s up to you to ensure that you possess the knowledge, skills, and attitude required to be an effective trainer.

Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes Required for Success

As a trainer, you play a critical role in the transfer of new concepts and ideas to your learners. Here are some of the responsibilities that’ll prepare you to engage with learners in a structured format:

• Developing a training plan
• Choosing the timing and training methods
• Creating or sourcing training materials and aids
• Conducting training sessions
• And Evaluating performance

Activity

Even though it’s very important to bring your own level of knowledge and experience to your training sessions, there are additional competencies that you need to possess. Before we dive into these, grab a piece of paper and brainstorm a list of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that you believe are important in your role as a trainer.

Here, I’ll give you one to start.

Patience – Patience belongs on the list as it’s a very important skill or attitude, depending on how you look at it, that you’ll need to have and continuously improve.

Once you’ve completed your list, next to each knowledge, skill, and attitude, write a brief explanation of how you think it’ll be helpful to you as a trainer.

For example, next to the skill patience, you can write: Patience will be helpful because my learners will not understand the materials in the same way that I do and may need additional time to fully grasp what I’m teaching.

And

Some learners may disrupt my training sessions and create distractions. While this may be frustrating to me, I’ll need to remain patient and professional.

So you can see, there can definitely be more than one reason why these items may be helpful.

Once you’re done the exercise, you can compare how your answers align with the competencies that we discuss.