STA Training - Trainer Attributes

What does it take to be an STA Associate?

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Someone asked this question in an email:

"I am currently working as an accountant in Wellington but I am interested in becoming a trainer. I am interested to know the qualifications and/or experience I would require to be able to be a trainer in an organisation such as yours. Thank you for your assistance, (name withheld for obvious reasons)"

The reply we sent might be of interest to others, so here it is:

Well, first up you need commercial experience, the more the better. That is, you can't be fresh out of Uni. We need (and our participants expect and respect) people who can say 'been there, done that'. The less experience you have, the fewer the programmes you can teach, the less use you are to us (that's hard, but true). As an example, the Supervisor programme simply can't be facilitated by someone who has never been a supervisor. In your area of expertise, we run a programme called Debt Recovery. Unless you have actually been personally involved in credit management, including making those yukky calls and sending out the tough letters and dealing with abusive people - then you can't facilitate the workshop. Senior managers we work with realise you can't run a company AND be a trainer - but if they find out you've never held a senior line management position, then you're dismissed as a 'theorist' and accorded a reduced level of respect. It's a tough world...

Then there's the up-front facilitator skills. The ability to work with all sorts of people, some nice and some not very nice at all, whom you have never met before, and establish a rapport and respect within minutes. We can teach you the mechanics of it as long as you have the above experience, but there's also a little beastie called 'presence', 'charisma', 'personality'. That special something that makes you more than a 'teacher' (we can't use them) or a 'lecturer' (they don't last 5 minutes in this job), that makes your workshops 'electric', 'dynamic'. All lovely buzz-words, but it's hard to describe it any other way.

We work with (and are friends with!) some truly brilliant University lecturers who quite openly admit that they are appallingly bad facilitators. Knowledge is only part of the recipe...

Finally, and thirdly in importance, there's Tertiary Qualifications. If you were to ask "what are the academic qualifications required" we would say to you that, as a minimum, you need either a Uni paper in Training and Development, or a Certificate in Adult Training and Education (CATE) which you can get in 12 months after-hours at Polytech. That gives you the basic knowledge and 'authority' to be up the front of the room with a white-board marker in your hand.

Past that point, it depends on what programmes you want to facilitate. For instance, most of us on the permanent team avoid getting too involved in the financial side of Strategic Planning (ie the detailed technical side). We have a CA on the 'extended' team who comes in to do that part of the programme. The rest of it we can handle quite nicely thank you. We try not to be 'all things to all people' - as an example, we're currently trying to identify a good facilitator with a Psych degree who can take over and develop the psychometric testing part of our Change Management and Team Building programmes.

Are there any 'discriminators'?

Well, we don't pay salaries - our Associates receive a share of net revenue. They are self-employed (ensures personal commitment to a high level of Customer Service and quality programmes), and contracted exclusively to STA. If you need a salary, look elsewhere.

Depending on the programme, younger facilitators have a hard time gaining respect.

Academics have a hard time if they haven't got plenty of work-place experience (unless they are introduced as such and used in a specific way).

Gender factors sometimes play a part in some of the more 'physical' industries we work in (Forestry, etc), idealists simply don't survive. 'Sensible' clothing and dress style applies...

Many of the venues we work in are not set up for the differently-abled facilitator (or participant for that matter), although this is changing.

Our clients pay for results and don't care about the personal circumstances of STA facilitators. If you're a single parent without support people and the client wants you in Eketahuna at short notice, you have to get there, with kids if that's what it takes.

All the above probably sounds a bit hard, but that's the reality.

If you've got qualifications and no work experience, maybe we can work around it, using you on certain programmes only. If you've got the experience and no qualifications, we can work around it, helping you get the qualifications and using you in certain programmes in the interim.

But if you haven't got the internal, personal abilities to do with establishing empathy, warmth, charm, caring, sincerity, and those nebulous things described with words such as 'charisma' and 'presence' then there's not a lot we can do about that. Can those things be taught?. Some have it, some don't.

Are you sure you want to do this? !!!!!!!!!!

We hope we haven't turned you off - it really is a wonderful job otherwise we wouldn't have been doing it for so long. We just remembered some more discriminators. Unlike teachers, you don't get four holidays a year and teacher-only days - in fact you don't get any holidays until the clients say you can, and you are intensively mentally involved from 8.30 in the morning until 4.30pm, and that can be six days a week in our peak periods. Your brain needs to be about 20 seconds ahead of your mouth, and about a minute ahead of the participants. Adults are very demanding learners. Sick days apply to other people. There simply isn't any such thing as a 'stand-in'. Headaches have to be managed, as does the 'flu. A tummy-bug simply means restructuring the programme to make the group-debates happen at regular intervals. If you don't like flying, forget it. Evenings? Oh - if you're not travelling, writing proposals or creating some fancy new overheads, you just might have time for your family.

That's about it.

There are trainers out there to whom all the above doesn't apply. And we're sure they're very happy too. But they're not STA Associates. As a Team, we stick together and support each other. Now perhaps you understand why good facilitators are well paid.

Kindest Regards

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Page updated 20th June 2008