Train the Trainer
Most organisations pay an external trainer to come in and teach or facilitate workshops when they have fantastic talent in-house. What you want is to help your experts get their knowledge and expertise out of their heads and into the minds of others – even better, create an internal cycle where you have people who can teach those experts how to teach the next generation to pass on their knowledge. But that’s not something that’s on your radar, because almost nobody offers it.
The work looks different depending on where you're sitting. Most trainers work at the level of what - the skill, the outcome, the behaviour. Some go further, to the why: the understanding underneath the action, the reasoning that's become automatic and invisible even to the person performing it. Very few work at the level where someone can surface their own reasoning, read the model underneath another person's errors, and teach that process to someone else. Most organisations need people who can surface what they know and pass it on – very few have the ability to train their own trainers in-house.
The hardest thing for someone to teach is what they don’t know that they know. So we work on making the implicit explicit — surfacing what's gone underground, putting words to the understanding the person didn't know they had, until they can access it themselves and pass it on. That moment when someone who has done something for years, who can explain their processes in their sleep, suddenly stops mid-sentence – eyes fixed on something that even they can’t quite see, but that they didn’t even realise was a possibility until just now. Something is shifting at the edge of understanding and possibility, and it still makes my skin tingle every time I see it.
You’ve reached someone’s ceiling. Now you’re going to lift it together.
The process
Some people need to learn how to teach before they can deliver any training at all. Some are already teaching but need to go further – the structure is the same either way, the depth depends on where you're starting from. An expert who can describe what they do and correct errors in someone else’s process is the minimum requirement of an internal trainer, but a huge waste of their potential. When you have the ability to explain the reasoning, the thought process and the why behind the decisions that inform their choices – that’s value that compounds across the organisation.
Step 1 – Establishing a baseline
This isn’t about checking subject knowledge – you are the experts in that. This is about establishing whether people are teaching skills and outcomes, or whether they understand their own processes well enough to teach the why underneath it. You want to pass along the organisational values, the tacit organisational knowledge that is embedded in repeated micro-decisions. We will work through simple but effective exercises that get under the skin of how they actually explain what they do. When practitioners who have been passing on knowledge to others get asked to really explain what they are actually doing in that process, they often don’t have a detailed answer. Not because the knowledge isn’t there, but because it is hidden from them by experience – surfacing this insight can be a frustrating experience so personal examples and insights from years of doing this with aviators and leaders help bring it to life and make it feel more “normal”.
Step 2 – Building the knowledge
Once we understand where we are starting from, we build the remaining knowledge. You can read an article or use GenAI to understand different learning styles and how to build a lesson that caters for different approaches – we will be working at the level of understanding how your trainers think about teaching, what that means for their role in the organisation, and why that matters. Helping them to identify and understand the gaps in their own underlying knowledge, to appreciate the importance of the things they haven’t even considered before, and change how they think about teaching before we go anywhere near practical teaching skills. Gaining knowledge isn’t the lesson here, it is the practical application and demonstration of that knowledge – each workshop is a worked example of what we mean. Walking through the reasoning behind how the workshops they are receiving are structured helps to put context around the importance of instructional choices, in an instantly-identifiable way.
Step 3 – Observed Practice
The practical application of the knowledge – short, 20 minute prepared lessons. Teaching something to groups, being observed, receiving feedback on it and then improving for the next time. Learning to critique your own lessons, not to find problems and self-flagellate but to improve iteratively because you care about the outcomes. They observe each others’ lessons, because the ability to give accurate, timely and actionable feedback on what went well and what would make it better is a fundamental part of teaching. We are always circling back to why, closing the loop, explaining the punchline, because otherwise this becomes interesting abstract knowledge as opposed to the foundation of a new way of thinking about doing the job.
Step 4 – Observed delivery
Depending on practicalities, observations of real training “in the wild”, because we are all different under sanitised test conditions that we are when the real world intrudes. Feedback from the live learners is integral here – they are the reason you are training in-house trainers after all. So we include their views to capture what works in your context as opposed to in abstract – testing your assumptions about your audience, and at the same time showing through example that learning requires active participation from the learners.
Who am I?
Twenty years developing military flying instructors - and then teaching the people who teach them -teaches you to work at levels most training never reaches. In aviation, feedback is fast and unambiguous. You learn precision quickly, or you learn nothing useful. What that environment produces is a particular way of seeing the gap between what someone does and why they do it. Then you build the ability to work in that gap under real pressure, with clarity and directness.
Developing trainers who can teach other trainers how to teach is rare enough in the corporate world that most people haven’t encountered it, but that’s where my background sits. Teaching people to teach people to teach is a lot of layers, but it’s something I’ve done for years, at night, at low level in a helicopter, with 200 aircrew depending on the outcome.
Alongside the military instruction, I hold a Post-Graduate Certificate in Higher and Professional Education. But credentials tell you I'm qualified. They don't tell you whether your organisation is ready for this kind of work. That's what the first conversation is for.
