What is the Role of a Facilitation Guide in Your Instructor-Led Training?

Who is a Training Facilitator?

A training facilitator is a person who is responsible for developing and producing learning and development (L&D) programs within an organization. Effective L&D programs require facilitators to take on many responsibilities. This role includes not only conducting workshops or training sessions and workshops but also providing support to learners, gathering meeting logistics, and measuring success. Training facilitators also work closely with organizational heads responsible for L&D to ensure that training outcomes align with overall business goals and meet the needs of employees.

What is a Facilitation Guide?

A facilitation guide is a structured document that outlines the process, methods, and activities designed to support and manage a group discussion or workshop. It serves as a roadmap for facilitators, helping them navigate through the session effectively, ensuring that the objectives are met and that every participant is engaged and contributes to the conversation or learning experience. In instructor-led training (ILT), a facilitation guide makes sure consistency across training sessions by including step-by-step instructions/guides for facilitators.

A facilitation guide typically contains information like:

1. An overview of session objectives and agenda
2. Timing information for each topic to keep facilitators on track
3. Notes on learning material and activities

A facilitation guide is important because it gives facilitators a roadmap for their training sessions. Whether someone is a seasoned expert or new to facilitation, these guides keep them on track in terms of the session’s goals, learning material, and pacing.

Difference Between a Lesson Plan and a Facilitation Guide:

How to Write an Effective Facilitation Guide?

Your facilitator doesn’t need to be a subject matter expert (SME) to facilitate effective training. Facilitators mostly go through a train-the-trainer course to learn the material, training objectives, and activities. This ensures the importance of an effective facilitation guide.

Here’s how to write one:

Define Objectives

It is crucial to ensure that the training your organization provides is effective and achieves its intended goal. This is where setting clear training objectives comes in. Training objectives are specific goals that define what learners are expected to achieve once they’ve completed their training. What do you want the participants to learn, understand, or achieve by the end of the session? Clear training objectives also inform learners what metrics will be used to evaluate when they gained that knowledge. In turn, trainers will have a clear direction on how to evaluate if the training objective has been completed or not.

Understand Your Audience

Knowing your audience makes you better able to connect with them. It means you know enough about their values, backgrounds, and beliefs to understand what matters to them. The more you learn about your audience, the better you can plan communication. To understand more about your audience, start by asking yourself the following questions:

1. What type(s) of people is/are my audience?
2. How much does my audience know about this topic?
3. What do I need my audience to know and understand?
4. How does this topic impact my audience?
5. How does this topic impact the organization that my audience works for?
6. What types of culture does the organization that my audience works for have? And so.

Outline the Structure

There is a natural flow that any decent training session should follow. A typical structure might include an introduction, main activity sections, breaks, and a conclusion or wrap-up. However, you should be aware that all presentation structures are different in their own way, and this will be due to a number of factors, including:

1. Whether you need to deliver any demonstrations
2. How knowledgeable the audience already is on the given subject
3. How much interaction do you want from the audience
4. Any time constraints there are for your talk
5. What setting are you in
6. Your ability to use any visual assistance

Design Activities

Anticipate the kind of activities that will be most engaging and valuable in terms of helping your employees retain information effectively or learn a skill. Provide an exact explanation of how the activity will profit them and help them achieve their goals so that they understand its importance. Also, carefully plan for how long each activity will take. Be careful to leave enough time for learners to reflect on the activity and share what they just learned with you and the group.

Include Instructions for Facilitators

Provide clear, step-by-step instructions/guide on how to conduct each activity, including time allocations, materials needed, and how to handle discussions or any technology used. This guide will give you an excellent foundation in facilitation skills. Decide on the methods for participant interaction (e.g., group discussions, breakout sessions, Q&A, exit polls) and include guidelines for facilitating these interactions effectively.

Prepare Materials

Training materials are all kinds of content necessary for any training program or activity that involves learning acquisition and retention. They include written documents, manuals or handbooks, video presentations, and online training courses. You should consider providing training materials to help ensure that your employees receive consistent information about their training.

Evaluation and Feedback

Rather than ending the session abruptly, incorporate a mechanism for gathering feedback on the session to assess its effectiveness and areas for improvement by using a final application activity. This will also help assess how well they’ve learned the training presented and how valuable they found it to be. A few examples of such closing activities include:

1. Quiz Show: Ask the group fun review questions to try to answer them quickly.
2. 3,2,1: Ask them to write three concepts they’ve learned, two concepts they’ve confirmed, and one major doubt they still have.
3. Exit Poll: Ask them questions and have them write their names and answers to the questions on a piece of paper or using an online form that they hand to you on the way out.

This above model has proven to be successful, but only if organizations pick the right facilitators. To find quality facilitators, organizations should look for employees with good communication skills, the ability to lead a group of people, and the ability to give constructive feedback.

Enable learning in the flow of work with Learning Everest’s experiences and self-help support

From the discussion above, we can now definitely gather how training facilitators play a critical role in developing engaging L&D initiatives. By providing training facilitators with effective facilitation guides, L&D teams can design training programs to promote supportive learning experiences for employees. By offering context-sensitive approaches, tutorials, and on-screen guidance, Learning Everest empowers facilitators to learn and apply new skills directly within their own applications. This approach enhances their proficiency and productivity while minimizing disruptions to workflow.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is a facilitation guide?

A facilitation guide is a structured document that outlines the process, methods, and activities designed to support and manage a group discussion or workshop.

What is the purpose of facilitation?

Facilitation is the method used by trainers to help learners acquire, retain, and apply knowledge and skills.

What is the difference between a lesson plan and a facilitator guide?

Facilitation guides and lesson plans are the detailed guides that an educator/trainer can use to implement a specific strategy.