Soft skills are one of the most important differentiators between a great trainer and an average trainer. Measuring and analysing the soft skills of your trainers and coaches is key to levelling up your live training – and AI might just be the answer to levelling up your VILT...
We’ve all done it.
We’ve all sat through an excruciating training session with a trainer who has the charisma of plain toast, who would clearly rather be anywhere else. It feels more like an endurance exercise than corporate training – think Gareth Keenan’s health and safety training in The Office:
A trainer or coach might be an expert in their topic, but that doesn’t mean they’ll automatically be good at delivering training. In fact, a massive part of being a good trainer is nothing to do with knowledge – it’s about the soft skills you can bring to the role to make each session engaging and memorable.
If you’re offering instructor-led training (ILT) or virtual instructor-led training (VILT), you’ll understandably want to make sure your trainers and coaches are performing at their best. If you’re left in the dark about the quality of your live training, it’s time to consider a new approach.
For live training sessions, it’s not always easy to measure the quality of that training.
Many L&D teams rely on ‘happy sheets’ to find out how much learners enjoyed the training, or how useful they found it, but few go beyond this to uncover the real quality of the training.
Live ILT and VILT tends to be more expensive than asynchronous, on-demand elearning, as it requires the time and presence of a trainer, instructor or coach, as well as preparation time and follow-up communications. Not all trainers are made equal, so the quality of the training you’re getting from your spend can vary wildly – and as a result, so can the learning outcomes.
Those happy sheets can only tell us so much. Learners may enjoy the session, but that doesn’t tell us if they liked the free lunch, they enjoyed having a couple of hours away from work or the trainer was actually effective. To dig deeper into trainer effectiveness, we need a better way to assess trainers while they’re actually training, without needing to rely on expensive human assessors.
Trainers are often busy and pulled in lots of different directions – especially if they’re an SME imparting their wisdom, rather than a dedicated training instructor or coach. In lieu of taking formal assessments, or being monitored by a human assessor, how can we find an easy way to measure the skills and effectiveness of trainers without requiring more of their precious time?
Enter Helix. Helix is a tool which passively measures soft skills in real time, making it the perfect sidekick to track the skills of your VILT coaches and trainers with absolutely no extra time or effort required.
Let’s explore a few examples:
Obviously, an essential part of being a great coach is great coaching skills! Helix will join your coach’s VILT training sessions and listen out for key coaching behaviours (or indicators that their coaching isn’t hitting the mark).
For instance, is your coach asking open-ended, reflective questions? Are they guiding learners towards the right answer rather than telling them what to do? Are they celebrating progress while also encouraging learners to stretch themselves? Are they revisiting goals? Are they offering personalised feedback? The way these behaviours are demonstrated will give you a valuable insight into the coaching skills of your trainers.
Each trainer will have their own approach to communication. Some may be funny and conversational, while others will be more corporate and professional. Your organisation’s preferred approach doesn’t matter – Helix will assess your trainer based on universal indicators of strong communication skills.
Helix will look for behaviours like clear, structured delivery, adapting the message to the audience, checking understanding, balancing speaking and listening and summarising key points. If you want Helix to take your organisation’s preferred approach to training into account (for instance, some businesses may prefer the serious, corporate approach), the ability to tweak the skills and behaviours measured is coming very soon!
Training is a two-way street, and if a trainer doesn’t engage in conversation with their learners, it’s worth asking why! Nobody will understand 100% of the content 100% of the time, so good trainers and coaches should anticipate questions and be ready to clarify and elaborate on their points.
When questions inevitably arise in your VILT sessions, Helix will listen out for behaviours like acknowledging emotions, such as confusion or frustration, listening without interrupting, summarising the learner’s point and following up to ensure understanding.
Maintaining high standards across your live training should be a top priority for L&D leaders. Trainers and coaches aren’t cheap, so you want to be sure you’re maximising your value for money and investing in engaging, effective instructors.
For L&D leaders, the benefits of choosing AI tools like Helix to track the soft skills of your trainers include:
For the trainers and coaches themselves, regular skills tracking, feedback and QA creates a whole host of opportunities for recognition and professional development. It’s not about surveillance – it’s about helping trainers recognise their own skills and constantly refine and polish their training delivery for the best possible results.
Some of the biggest benefits of soft skill tracking for trainers include:
Until now, L&D departments have had to rely on anecdotal evidence and occasional observations to draw conclusions about their trainers and coaches.
Now, with the power of AI skills intelligence solutions like Helix, L&D teams can gain immediate insights into the skills of trainers, along with understanding how they’re developing over time.
AI is your secret weapon for strengthening your L&D offering, equipping trainers with the soft skills they need to perform at their best and maximising the impact of your training programme.
If VILT is a big part of your live training strategy, Helix can help you discover, measure and track the soft skills of your trainers and coaches to make sure you’re getting the best value out of your training investment. By taking two seconds to invite Helix to each training session, you’ll get access to a rich bank of data about every trainer, ensuring your L&D team can invest your time and budget in the right places and make the best decisions for your coaches, your stakeholders and your learners. It’s a real win-win-win!