I’ve been a trainer since 2016. Throughout the years I’ve held hundreds of hours of trainings- mostly around web development, and there’s one consistent way I always managed to get better.
I’m going to share with you a few habits that have helped me a lot along the way, so that you can become a better trainer just by leveraging your own strengths.
Spoiler: It all begins with asking for, or getting feedback, but there are many ways to do it and we’ll be seeing a few of those right here.
How asking for feedback changed the way I work
As a trainer, I’ve often found myself balancing between focusing on my participants or their engagement level and my actual curriculum. One of the things I’ve come to realize is there isn’t a perfect approach to all types of sessions you’re holding, some might need a faster pace that engages with the audience more because it’s a broader subject or a less technical audience, while others may require a slower pace, going more in-depth in the details of the topic you’re presenting.
As you come before similar audiences or present similar concepts over time, you start to get a better sense of how your speech actually lands, how much impact it has on your participants, and you start getting the vague feeling you need to improve something about it all because it just doesn’t feel right.
Identifying the problem 🎯
We often find ourselves feeling like there’s a problem, be it because our participants aren’t paying the attention we’d like them to, or because we get a lot of questions about something we’ve already covered but it just hasn’t hit its mark.
Here’s a few ways you can find what’s holding you back as a trainer:
Make short pauses, use them to observe the participants and whether they’re paying attention to you or they’ve gotten distracted by their phones, for example.
Ask open questions – This will help you get an understanding of what the audience thinks, and observe not just how well the message got across, but actually how many of them are willing to engage with you.
Ask for feedback at the end of your sessions – While you can get a pulse during your performance with the aforementioned methods, you will not be able to go into details about how or why, so the best time to ask for details it is right after you are done.
Asking for feedback
This is a simple comparison between the ways you can get feedback from multiple people with pros and cons:
Spoken Feedback 🗣️
(open or private discussion)
Pros:
Speech is the fastest way for information to be transferred between people.
Cons:
Impractical for large audiences.
Some people might be more introverted or less interested to provide you with said feedback. As such, you might get an empty answer or rejection from some people.
What ever isn’t written down, can unfortunately be easily forgotten.
Written Feedback ✏️
(like post it notes)
Pros:
It can easily be anonymous, and people can be more comfortable sharing the feedback in a written manner.
Writing with a pen can increase creativity, leading to more complete answers.
Cons:
Not everyone has great handwriting, and you might end up missing out on a few notes if you don’t notice in time.
Losing physical notes is always a risk, and you’re often creating a mess or scrambling for pens.
Digital Feedback 📝
Pros:
Much easier to create and distribute online forms
You can use your forms endlessly without needing any paper or pens
Works for any audience size, asynchronously or even after the fact by sending a link.
Cons:
Many online form builders can be expensive, charging upwards of $20-50 per month.
Some demographics might be less inclined to use technology in general.
Where that lead me
Currently, what I found works out best for me is making sure I have an online form prepared for every occasion- be it one per course session or one for a whole series of sessions. I can easily share them as a QR code so anyone with a phone can get the link and fill it out in their own pace.
As I gather more feedback I always go back to revisit the feedback over time to see how I evolved and how my attempts to improve certain behaviors like filler words improve, as they get mentioned less and less throughout the feedback. For large feedback sets, I tend to use AI to extract summaries when looking at old forms, which is one of the features I find most useful in Central Feedback.
In time, you will get to see trends across all your deliveries, like “you could smile more” which is a common one for many people starting out, or “your jokes really help switch up the pace from more serious concepts” which is one piece of feedback I’m constantly trying to get. General feedback is just as valuable as per-session feedback, because you’ll know where you stand in terms of your own style and how you can appeal to the generic, unknown, audience.
Where it should lead you
One thing you will get to notice at some point, is that you’ll receive similar feedback on similar topics, and similar feedback from similar audiences:
Your explanation of […] was much too rushed, I couldn’t follow the next part where you built on top of it.
You might get to something as small as a concept or definition that is overwhelming or underwhelming and ends up derailing the rest of your talk for a great chunk of your audience. It happens a lot with technical topics, and you’ll be hard pressed to identify what exactly goes wrong without asking people.
In conclusion
The best advice I can give you is: Create a free online form and start gathering feedback now, and in time your way to becoming better will make itself obvious to you.
This article was initially posted on the Central Feedback Blog.
Top comments (2)
Welcome, Paul Ghiran! 🚀
Your words have found a new home, and we’re thrilled to have you! Keep writing, keep exploring, and let’s make magic together. 🎨📖
Thank you for the kind words Robin