Training Design, Delivery, and Diplomacy

Veteran instructional coaches A. Keith Young and Tamarra Osborne provide practical advice for trainers seeking high-leverage strategies for successful professional trainings.

How do you see yourself as a trainer? Are you occasionally extraordinary, or do you flail about a bit? Are you connected to a helpful community of other trainers, or are you just starting out and feeling isolated and alone in your job? Do your workshops end with thunderous applause, or do you have nightmares about participants gazing into the middle distance and leaving with little more than they started with?

Odds are, you've experienced multiple successes and failures—and that's OK! Regardless of your starting point or previous experiences, Training Design, Delivery, and Diplomacy outlines the essential components you need to build a powerful training program.

Young and Osborne (coauthors of The Instructional Coaching Handbook) present dozens of strategies to help both novice and expert trainers avoid common (and not-so-common) training pitfalls, enabling the design and delivery of powerful sessions where folks walk away energized with new skills and understanding.

They also introduce valuable tips for engaging participants and managing challenging behavior with diplomacy. Finally, they offer guidance on building and maintaining an effective train-the-trainer program and suggestions for conducting virtual activities in an online setting.

If you feel a bit lost in your own workshop planning, this is exactly the little presentation skills book you've been looking for!