The skills of the e-trainer

The successful classroom trainer is more than 50% of the way along the road to being an effective e-trainer, but some skills have to be honed and others acquired from scratch. Sanjay Dalal is Director of Training Center Business for virtual classroom provider WebEx: “The e-trainer needs the ability to adapt training materials to be extremely visual, allowing plenty of opportunities for trainees to interact using online tools, such as the whiteboard, polling and application sharing. And because virtual classroom sessions are relatively short – averaging about one hour – e-trainers need to be able ‘chunk’ materials appropriately, both in terms of length and in terms of the logical flow of the course as a whole.”

E-trainers also need effective soft skills, as Dalal explains: “The e-trainer needs to be a very strong facilitator, with the ability to call on people and get them involved, combined with active listening skills and the use of a variety of questioning techniques. Sometimes the trainer will inject some humour into the mix to create a more relaxed, yet interactive forum for trainees.”

Mark Stimson is General Manager, EMEA for Click2Learn, which incorporates a fully-featured virtual classroom into their learning management solution Aspen: “It’s important for e-trainers to use their classroom experience to keep the group engaged. The best way to accomplish this is through interaction, to the extent of students actually taking over part of the session.”

Stimson emphasises the importance of preparation: “Trainers need to pay adequate attention to getting ready for the session. This means not only preparing the materials but ensuring there will be no technical hiccoughs. All connections need to be tested with learners to resolve firewall issues and to ensure bandwidth is adequate for what you are proposing to do. You may not be able to use streamed audio, video or application sharing on the worst connections, in which case you’ll have to concentrate on less hungry media, such as slides, polls and chats.”

Stimson goes on: “What happens afterwards is equally important if the learning process is to be effective. One idea is to follow-up the virtual event with an asynchronous discussion forum, which keeps the learning alive and allows learners to reflect”. Stimson quotes learning guru Peter Honey: “Life is just a series of befores, durings and afters, with the quality of the during largely determined by what happens before and what happens after it.”

Of course, even the best trainers can find themselves with a difficult audience, that just doesn’t seem suited to a virtual approach. Kathy Morris is European Learning and Development Manager for Parametric Technology, supplier of product lifecycle management solutions: “Our challenge was to train managers around Europe on the company’s new performance management system. Unfortunately our Southern European managers were less than enthusiastic about the idea of virtual training. The problem was largely one of language. In the classroom, they were able to undertake exercises in their own language and help each other over any misunderstandings. This didn’t look it would be possible online. In the end we compromised on a unique blended solution: the course started with pre-work, done on a self-study basis; we then ran a hybrid live and virtual event in which the group met locally and I provided my input online, using PlaceWare. I would set an activity off, go offline and wait for the group to complete the activity. We would then ’reconvene’ for a report back. The solution worked, saving a great deal of my time and budget in the process.”