Trainers, are you a knowledge presenter or a facilitator of learning?

In today’s workplace, employees are often encouraged to work cooperatively and creatively together. This led to individual employees being asked to chair a meeting, lead in a task force discussion, or coordinate a brainstorming session, all which employ a skill known as facilitation. Facilitation skill is now one of the sought-after skills in employees. Most L&D teams, if not all, would have offered facilitation skills training for their staff one point of time.

According to the dictionary,

Facilitate means to make (an action or process) easy or easier.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY

Why, then, are trainers, in general, not adopting facilitation as a method of training to make the learning process easier and more effective?

Two years ago, I invited a well-known trainer to conduct a training workshop on social learning. Unfortunately he was already engaged on the selected date and therefore offered one of his staff as the replacement trainer at a reduced cost. I was hesitant but finally agreed because it was one of the rare times that I could gather together this group of audience from seven countries. I was disappointed to find that the replacement trainer lacked the ability to facilitate the workshop. Mind you, the learners themselves were trainers who had already begun exploring the subject matter. At one point, I had to take over the facilitation process. The trainer was an expert in the subject and could present moderately well but didn’t have the facilitation skills to effectively conduct the training workshop for the targeted audience.

The new generation of learners are increasingly rejecting the idea of sitting in a training session to listen to facts, tips and stories. After all, information and knowledge are so easily obtainable these days via books and the internet. Depending on the topic and audience, I believe most training sessions should focus more on helping the learners join pieces of information together into meaningful context that is applicable in their present situation.  Each learner would have come to the training session from different paradigms. The trainer’s role is to help expand that paradigm.

The trainer acts as the facilitator rather than the expert presenter with the purpose to shape and guide learners to accomplish their own learning goals in the training session they attend. Why is there a need to make this shift from “trainer as knowledge owner” to “facilitator of knowledge acquisition and knowledge processing”?  

• The experts are experienced employees who had been doing their job very well, not the trainer.
• The experts are a collective group of people in the company, not just one person.
• Collaborative learning is achieved through shared and varied on-the-job experiences.
• The learners can easily obtain information and knowledge on their own.
• Time is too precious to be spent on something that can be done at your own.

I'm not an excellent presenter but I do find it easier to be a trainer presenting from the front compared to being a facilitator because I can rehearse beforehand. However there is an art in bringing facilitation to life which cannot be rehearsed. This skill can only be honed with lots of actual experience.

If you are a trainer who has employed facilitation in face-to-face training, do share your experiences, tips and stories so that we can learn together.

If you are a trainer who is trying to make this shift, what are your challenges?