Whether you are a new freelance corporate trainer or established in this area, here are some great resources and tools for training designers that can come in handy as a trainer or teacher in the workplace.
Training Activities & Games
To engage participants in the classroom to make the training fun, interesting, and memorable, I always recommend including activities and games.
Some activities can act as icebreakers at the beginning of the training to help everyone relax and get to know each other a little more.
Whether an icebreaker or not, though, the activity or game should tie in with whatever you are teaching, and these activities are ones you can draw on to include in training and when teaching:
- 12 resilience activities that are fun – resilience is a great topic to teach, whether to students or to employees.
- If you are teaching online, these 21 Virtual team-building activities will be useful.
- Goal-Setting activities and games are always useful as goal setting permeates every aspect of teaching and training.
- You might also require quick and fast teaching and training activities, and these 21 ideas are ideal for use both online and in a classroom to make training more enjoyable for participants.
Designing Courseware & Lesson Plans
If you have the time and are designing your own materials, then there are lots of great resources and tools online that you can use, and some of my favorites are as follows:
- For designing any kind of graphic, whether it be a blog banner, leaflet, Pinterest banner, Facebook banner, or so on, just use Canva! It is FREE!
- FREE stock images to use on your trainer’s site or in courseware. This post explains everything you need to know about stock photos, although it is worth remembering that in Canva (as discussed above), you will also have access to stock images.
- To find classroom activities to include in training, download the FREE 54-page eBook on ‘Training Activities’.
- To create your own courses online if you wish, Teachable is the platform we recommend. It is very intuitive, and one of the biggest worldwide in terms of support and structure, and the pricing is reasonable.
Finding Courseware
There are several companies worldwide that offer training in a variety of topics, and it can mean that you:
- Save a massive amount of time (i.e., weeks designing your own materials)
- Get well, research-quality materials designed by an academic with 10+ years of business experience, too
- PowerPoints and teacher notes included
Example: instantly downloadable teaching & training materials
The materials are:
- customizable
- instantly downloadable on purchase
- designed so that they work for British and American English
Designing teaching materials when done well takes a lot of time, particularly when attention is needed for adding in training activities and factoring in the needs of different learner types.
Learning How to Be a Freelance or Corporate Trainer
The best way to get a solid understanding of how to be a good trainer is by doing the ‘Train the Trainer’ course below.
Finding Trainers
- Training Zone is arguably the best site online for finding trainers, with a thousand-plus trainers registered on Training Zone.
- Guru.com can also be a good resource for finding trainers and is worth checking, as they have a global network.
- Likewise, Upwork is another decent option for searching for either work as a trainer or for placing an ad to find a freelance trainer.
Online Tools for Training Designers for Research
Here are the tools we have used in the past for research, and that you might also find useful as you research and develop
- This post might be worth reading, which I wrote before on marketing yourself as a freelance trainer.
Keyword Analysis
- LSI Graph – a great tool for finding related keywords. This is a fantastic resource for discovering all connected terms.
- KW Finder – another great keyword term tool that you can use to also search specifically by country and language.
- KeywordTool.io – One of my favorite tools, use this site to easily find related terms and terminology.
Twitter Analysis
- Hashatit.com – another similar hashtag style tool. I like the way, though, that it presents the results with graphics also (you can log in with your Twitter ID or Facebook, although sign-up failed for me, so this tool does not seem good).
- Hashtagify.me – Not a cheap tool to use, but if your research is funded and there is a sizable budget, this tool can prove to be invaluable. This is one of the more sophisticated and hence more expensive options. This tool creates clever relationship diagrams.
Discovertext – This can create some deep analysis and is a good tool. You can use the trial and the FREE version, or a 50% academic discount.- Tweetarchivist – Subscription and not the most exciting option, but you might want to give it a try.
Creating Online Surveys
Some of the best online survey options for researchers, I would suggest, are as follows:
- Survey Monkey is quite a popular one and does everything you will need for basic surveys and for more advanced surveys (you have to pay for the more extensive option).
Getting Data from Online Usage
There are some great reports that you can get access to on internet usage worldwide, and these reports sometimes cost money to view or sometimes are available to view for free, such as through tour institutions.
Some of the best I would recommend are:
- The Pew Reports – The Pew Research Center provides reports on a wide range of topics, and although quite American-centric, these reports are extremely useful.
- The Digital Futures Project is a wonderful resource for getting data and statistics on world internet usage, trends, and a whole bunch of other information.
- The other big name is “Forrester Research,” and they are also always worth taking a look at.
