Quite a few people have contacted me recently for advice on becoming a trainer.
I've mentored trainers for over 20 years, and there are six skills that are absolutely essential. And while my focus is on customer service training, these skills are universal.
Any trainer should have them.
This post highlights each of the skills. You'll also find some some additional resources, including links to some of my LinkedIn Learning courses, that can help you fill any gaps.
You'll need a LinkedIn Learning subscription to view the courses, but a 30-day trial is available. The great thing is your subscription gets you access to the entire library, not just my courses.
As always, please leave a comment or contact me if you have any questions. I'm happy to help!
Skill #1: Customer service skills
Too obvious?
A trainer needs to know the content they're training. As simple as that might sound, it's not always the case.
Corporate trainers are routinely asked to train leadership skills, even though they've never led a team. They're asked to train sales teams, even though they don't sell. And they're asked to train customer service, even though they've never served a customer.
You can test the absurdity of trying to train something you don't know by picking a different topic. Would you...
Take guitar lessons from someone who couldn't play guitar?
Take dance lessons from someone who didn't know how to dance?
Take driving lessons from someone who had never driven?
Of course not!
So the first step to being a customer service trainer is to make sure you're awesome at customer service.
One resource that can help you develop elite skills is my LinkedIn Learning course, Customer Service Foundations. Over 150,000 people have taken this course because it covers a broad spectrum of essential skills, including building rapport, exceeding expectations, and solving problems.
Skill #2: Perform a gap analysis
This skill can save you a lot of effort. It involves identifying the gap between where you want to be and where you are now, and then analyzing how to get there.
Many of the training requests I get are too vague. Here are some real examples:
We want to improve customer service.
We need help with upset customers.
We need a refresher.
The trouble with these vague requests is it's impossible to know what training is needed, or whether any training is necessary at all.
Here's a different example that might help. Imagine I'm going to the hardware store. What tool should I buy?
That question doesn't make much sense without more context, does it? You'd probably want to know more about the project I'm working on, what tools I already have, and my general ability with tools.
A gap analysis helps you get more specific with training.
It takes a generic request for "customer service training" and transforms it into something specific by digging deeper. Here are the three steps to conducting a gap analysis:
Identify the goal.
Identify the present state.
Analyze the gap between the goal and the present state.
For example, if your customer service team has an 85 percent customer satisfaction goal, and the current average is 83 percent, you know the gap is two percentage points. Before doing any training, you'll want to know why the rating isn't already at 85.
That's where a gap analysis comes in handy. I've put together this guide to help you out.
Skill #3: Identify training issues
Not every workplace performance problem is a training issue. A good trainer should be able to tell the difference between a training problem and a non-training problem.
A client once contacted me for team building training. She wanted to send her entire team through a half-day workshop designed to improve their internal customer service skills.
When I asked her a few probing questions, she admitted the real problem was one employee who had an abrasive personality.
Training wouldn't have helped. It might even have made it worse, if employees resented having to attend training when the source of the problem was clear. What the leader really needed to do was address the issue with the abrasive member of her team.
You can only fix three problems with training. A gap in:
Knowledge
Skill
Ability
Trainers often refer to these as KSAs for short.
Training won't solve problems caused by a lack of resources, conflicting priorities, defective products, belligerent coworkers, or inefficient procedures.
You can learn more about determining whether something is a training issue from this short video.
Skill #4: Create learning objectives
Imagine you're asked to train employees to respond to customer inquiries. What content would you share? How would you decide whether learners had been fully trained?
Trainers often write vague statements and call them learning objectives, but they aren't really. Take this one, for example:
Learn to respond to customer inquiries.
This statement isn't a true learning objective because it lacks specificity. What specific content needs to be trained? How can we tell if someone has developed the right KSAs?
The ABCD model can help you quickly transform vague learning statements into real objectives. It's an acronym that stands for:
A = Audience: Who is being trained?
B = Behavior: What behavior does the audience need to do?
C = Condition: Under what conditions will the behavior be evaluated?
D = Degree: To what degree of accuracy must the behavior be demonstrated?
Here's how that customer inquiry objective might look using the ABCD model:
Customer service representatives will provide a timely response to a customer inquiry during in-class simulations five times without error.
You can see the breakdown:
A = Audience: Customer service representatives
B = Behavior: provide a timely response to a customer inquiry
C = Condition: during in-class simulations
D = Degree: five times without error
There's still some wiggle-room in this objective, such as what constitutes a timely response, or what customer inquiries will be used. However, it's far more specific and can better focus the trainer and learners.
You can download an ABCD objectives worksheet to help set your own learning objectives. This short video will provide even more information.
Skill #5: Facilitate learning
There are lots of ways to deliver training, but sometimes the simplest approach works great. That's why I recommend the tell, show, do method to trainers.
Many trainers spend too much time telling. In technical terms, this is what’s referred to as the “boring lecture.” The tell, show, do method helps trainers correct this issue.
For instance, let's say I want to train my contact center agents to deliver a great phone greeting. The tell, show, do method might go like this:
Tell: Explain how to deliver a great phone greeting.
Show: Demonstrate a great phone greeting.
Do: Ask participants to practice giving their best greeting.
This LinkedIn Learning video provides an example of what that lesson might look like.
Skill #6: Evaluate learning
All that training has to result in something. A trainer must be able to evaluate whether learning has occurred.
The easiest way to evaluate learning is to go back to your learning objectives. Can the learner demonstrate that they are able to fulfill the objectives?
For example, imagine your objective is this:
Customer service representatives will provide a timely response to a customer inquiry during in-class simulations five times without error.
You’ll know someone is trained when respond to mock customer inquiries five times in a row without error. On the other hand, a learner who makes a few mistakes will need some additional practice until they can finally go error-free five times in a row.
This is where a more advanced technique is needed.
You might have heard about something called the "learning curve." There really is a curve, and it consists of four distinct stages. Assessing where someone is on the curve is a critical skills for trainers.
Here are the four stages:
Unconscious incompetence: you don't know what you don't know
Conscious incompetence: you know what you don't know
Conscious competence: you know what you know
Unconscious competence: you don't know what you know
Most learners are at stage 3, conscious competence, when they complete learning objectives. It means they can demonstrate the required performance, but they might be overly conscious about it. Think about when you took your driving test to get your license. That’s a perfect example of what conscious competence feels like (assuming you passed!)
Innate skills reside at the unconscious competence level. That's where learners can use skills correctly without even thinking about it. For example, you can probably drive a car today without even thinking about it.
This short blog post explains the progression of a new hire from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence.
Additional Resources
There are a few resources that can help you develop your skills as a trainer.
One is your local Association for Talent Development (ATD) chapter. Many chapters offer mentor programs that will pair you with an experienced trainer who can guide your development.
If I had to recommend just one book for new trainers, it would be Telling Ain't Training, by Harold D. Stolovitch and Erica J. Keeps. It covers the basics very nicely.
Finally, my How to Design and Deliver Training Programs course on LinkedIn Learning will walk you through all the basics. You'll need a LinkedIn Learning subscription to view the entire course, but a 30-day trial is available.