Training Games for Trainers. The Common Game icebreaker

Page Updated on March 12, 2023

Not all training games for trainers achieve what this activity achieves, in that this one really helps to bring out some interesting facts about each participant. This game, in other words, is great for really connecting participants, based on joint interests.

The What's in common classroom activity for trainers — The What’s in common classroom activity for trainers

Page Contents

Duration and Cost

15 minutes is the ideal time frame for this activity. You can easily adapt it though to be 10 minutes or twenty minutes.
A FREE game that you can use and adapt for your own training and that we use in some of our popular training course materials.

Activity Category

Team Building

Participants

For this game, you will need 3 or more people in each group.
Five or six people in each group is the ideal team size.

Purpose of the Game

To get participants to engage with each other and to build rapport with their colleagues.

This also acts as a very good ice-breaker.

Participants will learn about the other participants’ strengths and individual traits and how to share and gather information as a team.

Instructions Part 1

Divide the participants up into groups of 4 or more.

The way I would recommend dividing people is to get each person to draw a number from a bag and then group of say 1-4 and 5-8 and so on.

The risk otherwise is that any friends will otherwise automatically group together.

Try and divide everyone up so that they meet people from other departments or sections within the company (if this is an in-house training session).

Then ask each group to discuss and then write down on a sheet of paper, the interesting things they everyone in that group has in common.

Ask the participants to avoid things that are too obvious such as being all female.

Tell them also to avoid anything related to the body or clothing to try and guide them towards coming up with more uncommon commonalities.

5 minutes should be given for this task.

At the end of the task, a member of each group should read the list of commonalities.

Instructions Part 2

Ask the participants to create new groups and to then make a list on ONE piece of paper, 2 traits that each member of the group has, unique that is, to those in their group.

After 5 minutes, ask one member of each team to read out the 2 unique attributes for one of the people in their group.

Other groups must then try and guess which person in the group the 2 attributes are from.

Training Game Benefits

This can be a fun activity that gets participants to communicate and learn about each other and to ask questions of each other.
It also gives work colleagues a chance to really get to know each other better.

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Dr Paul Symonds

Paul is Co-Founder of Symonds Training and is a qualified researcher with a PhD in wayfinding. Paul helps the team at Symonds Training build and focus on providing high-quality training materials packages and programs for trainers, classroom teachers and HR departments.