You spend a lot of time developing trainings, but how much time have you spent on developing yourself as a trainer? A well thought out training may fall flat without the right trainer. It’s worth spending a little time understanding the “why” and “how” of your training style, not just the “what”.
Before you start creating your training, it’s important to give some thought to the “why” you are training. What are the goals and objectives? Those will help you tailor the “how” – which is the method(s) you will use to build your training.
Types of Training
There are many training methods but we’ll focus on five common ones for adult learning since that is the most common age demographic for training. You may see them called different names but for our purposes they are:
- Liberal
- Behaviorist
- Progressive
- Humanistic
- Radical
Each of these methods have theoretical underpinnings and volumes of published work about them but for simplicity, we’ve developed a very high level chart to understand the major characteristics of each.
It’s important to understand your learners and why they are coming to a training so you can tailor your teaching style. For example, I am generally a “progressive” trainer. I like the style because it teaches through a very practical lens, fosters problem solving skills, and creates a learning environment that is very democratic. It is a natural style for my worldview, but depending on the training, I may consciously try to adopt a different style. For very technical job skills that must be performed exactly, I incorporate more of a behavioral method. For empowerment training, I try to use more humanistic methods.
Not sure what type of trainer you are? Here’s a quiz that will evaluate your teaching style. It’s a great starting point for thinking through how to tailor your adult learning efforts.
