10

A Final Note

What’s Inside This Chapter

• Important advice concerning the facilitator’s role in the organization

• Some ideas to support your continuing professional development

Continuous learning is critical to success on the individual, business unit, and organizational levels. An organization’s only sustainable advantage is its human capital. How that human capital is developed and delivered to address corporate and individual needs is a critical factor leading to ultimate success or failure. This is a huge issue for organizations in general and HRD in particular.

This issue encompasses many issues that are beyond the scope of this book, but you, the facilitator of learning, can play a key role. Your role goes beyond just presenting information in a two-day event. Your role is to make learning happen and to assist in having that learning applied on the job. Your role should not and cannot stop at the classroom door. As a facilitator, you influence the learners and prepare the environment to support the new knowledge, skills, and behaviors on the job. It is a large responsibility with critical results.

To fulfill your role with excellence, you must continue to develop your competencies as a professional. These competencies are dynamic and continue to evolve. Like any field, the HRD profession is continuing to change. There are new approaches to learning, new techniques, new facilitation skills, and ever-changing delivery methods, including the online and virtual classroom environments.

In addition, you must continue to develop your knowledge of the organization and industry of which you are a part. This is a dynamic environment with changing products, strategies, competitors, legal and regulatory requirements, and customer requirements, to mention just a few. To not only facilitate content, but also support transfer, you need to continue to stay abreast of these changes. In addition, you need to continue to develop your general business sense to maintain your credibility in your organization and stay current with new business jargon and concepts. It is amazing how many doors this will open for you.

The best facilitators are also subject matter experts. The days of a facilitator simply memorizing and delivering a script are past—you must be able to speak from your knowledge and experience. You must be able to respond to content questions beyond the superficial. And, you must be able to help the learners apply the content to their job situation.

That’s not to say that you do not need to know the material in the leader’s guide. You do, but that’s only the beginning. You need to be able to go beyond the guide. Your credibility and that of your department are at stake. You must be able to take the content deeper, extend the activities beyond where the learners are, and coach for transfer.

Basically, your job as facilitator is to:

• Support and increase performance of the individual, business unit, and organization.

• Help individuals and the organization solve business problems and meet objectives.

• Go beyond the classroom to support transfer of learning to the workplace.

• Make learning happen.

Your job is not to:

• Limit learning to the classroom.

• Be popular or liked.

• Meet your personal needs of being in the limelight, being right, or acting the part of expert.

Getting It Done

You can excel in your work by honing your skills and by strengthening a major weakness. Top performers continually develop themselves through readings, seminars, workshops, job assignments, coaching, and so forth.

Exercise 10-1 is a development plan for you to continue to chart your progress for excellent performance.

To support you in your continuous learning, consult the Additional Resources section of this book for additional reference material. The references are organized into categories to help you find the sources you need. This list is not exhaustive, but it will build on what you’ve learned here, and help start you on the road to excellence in facilitation.

Exercise 10–1. Continue Your Professional Development

In the spaces provided below:

• Describe one strength you want to hone and one weakness you want to overcome.

• Identify the method for development and required resources.

• Establish a timeline for your development activities.

• Determine the required feedback so you will know the extent of your improvement.

Describe one strength:

Describe one weakness:

Best wishes on your future facilitations!