Train the Trainer

What train the trainer is

Train the trainer, also called training of trainers (TOT), is the preparation of employees from within an organisation so that they can take on the training of their colleagues. Through it, a person who knows a subject becomes a person who can teach it.

The definition has two parts. One concerns where the trainers come from: they are employees of the organisation, not trainers brought in from outside it. The other concerns what changes in them: at the start they know the subject, and at the end they can teach that subject to colleagues. What train the trainer prepares, then, is the passing on of knowledge, and the knowledge to be passed on is assumed to be there before the programme begins.

Knowing and teaching: the gap train the trainer addresses

The premise on which a train the trainer programme rests is that knowing a subject and teaching it are not the same thing. Someone who has mastered a piece of work may be unable to break it down for a person who does not know it, because they now perform it without passing consciously through its steps.

The steps have not disappeared. The expert still carries them out, in the same order, each time the work is done. What has changed is that the expert no longer notices them, and the steps that a beginner would need to have explained are the very steps that the expert has stopped thinking about while working.

This gap between knowing and teaching is what a train the trainer programme addresses. It does so through three questions:

• How a skill is divided into steps that someone who does not know it can follow.
• Where a beginner can stumble on the way through those steps.
• How the trainer can tell that the message has been received.

Each of the three questions concerns teaching rather than the subject being taught. The first turns work that the expert performs as a whole back into a sequence. With the second, the trainer is asked to look at that sequence from the position of the person who is learning it. And the third asks for a way of confirming, at the end, that what was explained has reached the trainee, instead of assuming that it has because it was said.

What a train the trainer programme can cover

The content of a train the trainer programme can include four areas:

• Session design. It means designing a session that has a defined objective and an outcome that can be measured.
• Methods. They are the methods of explanation, of practice and of feedback through which a session is delivered.
• Managing the group. It covers the questions that trainees raise, disagreement in the room, and the different levels of the people who attend the same session.
• Evaluating the session. It means evaluating the effect of a session in a way that goes beyond the satisfaction of those who attended it.

The four areas follow the course of a single session. A session is designed before it is delivered; its delivery relies on explanation, practice and feedback; it is run with a group of people who differ from one another in what they ask, in what they disagree about and in the level at which they start; and it is evaluated once it has ended.

The last of the four areas is defined by what it goes beyond. The satisfaction of the people who attended a session is one measure of it, and the evaluation that a train the trainer programme covers does not stop at that measure. It looks at the effect of the session as well.

Why organisations turn to train the trainer

An internal trainer knows the context: the tools that are actually in use, the exceptions, and the mistakes that recur in this particular workplace. That is what an external trainer does not bring, however well they have mastered the subject.

The difference between the two trainers therefore lies in knowledge of the place, not in knowledge of the subject. An external trainer can know the subject as well as an internal one. What they do not have is knowledge of how the work is done in that specific organisation: which tools are used in practice, which cases depart from the rule, and which mistakes keep returning there.

A second reason is added to the first. With train the trainer, the knowledge stays inside the organisation instead of being hired in each time it is needed. In this respect the term connects with knowledge management.

What makes train the trainer fail

Four causes can make a train the trainer programme fail:

• Selection on expertise alone. Mastering a piece of work is one thing and being able to teach it is another, so selection rests on two things together: the wish to train and the ability to explain.
• Time that is not accounted for. Training that is asked of an employee on top of a full workload is put off, and is then delivered as a formality.
• Stopping at the first programme. A new trainer needs to be observed during their first sessions. Without that observation, what they learnt stays theoretical.
• No standardised content. When each trainer builds their own material, the message differs from one room to the next.

The first cause follows from the premise of train the trainer. If knowing a subject and teaching it are not the same thing, expertise in the subject cannot on its own show who will be able to teach it. The selection therefore looks for both conditions in the same person: someone who wants to train, and who can explain.

Time is the subject of the second cause. When the hours that training takes are not counted within the trainer’s workload, the training is added on top of a load that is already full. It is postponed first, and when it does take place, it is carried out as a formality.

The third cause lies after the programme. A train the trainer programme prepares a person to teach, but the new trainer’s first sessions are where that preparation is put into practice. If nobody observes those sessions, what the trainer learnt in the programme remains theoretical.

Material is where the fourth cause lies. Where there is no shared content and each trainer prepares their own, two groups trained on the same subject by two trainers can receive two different messages, and the difference comes from the room in which each group sat.

Where train the trainer sits in the training plan

Train the trainer is a means of carrying out training, not a substitute for planning it. It answers the question “who trains?” after training needs analysis has answered the question “what is the gap?”.

The two questions are asked in that order. Training needs analysis establishes what the organisation needs its employees to learn; train the trainer then prepares the people who will teach it. Building an internal training capacity before establishing what the organisation needs produces trainers with no subject.

So train the trainer does not decide what is trained. It takes that decision as given, from the analysis that comes before it, and its part in the training plan is to provide the people through whom the decision is carried out.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.

Related terms

• ADDIE Model
• Role Play Training
• Vestibule Training
• Spaced Practice
• Job Aids