Preparing to Train a New Topic

Before any trainer can run a successful training session, you need to sit down and learn the materials you are going to teach. Lucky for you, everything you need to do that is included in our professional training packages. You just need to take the time to review it and understand it in a way that you can teach it. Here’s how you can prepare to train a new topic to a group of participants.

Read Your Trainer Guide

The very first thing you should do is review the trainer guide thoroughly. There is a great deal of information included in your trainer guides, and they can act as your agenda, reference guide, and notebook so you can record important information you want to remember. As you go through your trainer guide, you’ll be able to see information from the participant guide, as well as the slide deck. This means you get a full picture of what the entire course looks like before you start. 

Review the Participant Guide

After you read the trainer guide thoroughly, review the participant guide. Make yourself familiar with the types of activities that are included in the course, pay attention to timings, and consider how you might answer some of the questions, solve some of the problems, and complete some of the exercises. You could do the entire participant guide yourself as a way of putting yourself in their shoes, which would provide you with more insight on the types of questions they might ask and problems you might run into while delivering the training.

Review and Practice the Slide Deck

Stand up in your living room or office and go through every slide included in your training package. Practice is essential for many reasons: first, you want to know what is coming and what to expect throughout the training process. Practice will enable you to be able to curate some personal or professional stories to include in your training to make it feel more relatable. Finally, you want to anticipate questions from participants about the material and be able to refer to the fact that a particular topic will be covered later, for example.

Research

While we give you everything you need to run a successful training course using our materials, it is a good idea to become very familiar with the content related to the topic. If you are delivering a training session on conflict resolution, you’ll want to do some additional reading about the topic and make notes so that you can draw on additional information for your courses. The more you train a subject, the better you will become at it. When you are first starting out, research is an integral part of your preparation process. This gives you a broad view of the industry or topic in which you are delivering the training session on, and it makes you appear more professional to your clients.

With so many courses to choose from, you can be delivering a new course almost every day this year. That means you can build your training business and your confidence as a trainer. It only takes a few hours to prepare for a training course, and that is time well spent. After you’ve taught a topic a few times, you’ll feel much more comfortable with it, and you’ll have gathered lots of stories, information, and additional research that will be useful in future courses.