Your own staff could be your best trainers, or they could also be your worst. It is easy to worry about the content of a training programme, and that is important, it is the first thing that comes to mind when setting out to create a training course. Consider, though, how important the person delivering the training is to the success of the training course. Think back to boring lectures we’ve all sat through, how well did you learn? The lesson here is that the person delivering the content plays such a vital part in the teaching-learning experience.

What is your picture of a perfect trainer?
You may think that you need someone who is outgoing and extroverted, someone who is considered an authority and feared, or someone with the highest qualifications. You don’t even need someone who seems absolutely confident and self-assured.

All you need is to turn wasted training into great and productive training, is:

• Someone who has credibility
• Someone who is engaging and creative
• Someone willing to be flexible and adaptable to new ways of teaching
• Someone who knows and understands the content

You almost certainly have people in your organisation that matches or comes close to this description – We can supply the rest. We can even help people to become more engaging and creative.

Is internal training right for me?

There are many situations where having internal trainers rather than bring in external trainers simply work for cleaning companies and inhouse cleaning teams. For example:

• Onboarding new cleaners – New cleaners to the workforce need specific training covering topics they need to know to get started and get up to speed quickly. It makes sense to use an existing cleaner with the experience and knowledge to deliver this, it also makes sense to use that personal touch to welcome the new employee into the company culture.
• Separated Cleaning Teams – It is very common for organisations to have small cleaning teams placed in many separate buildings or contracts. For example, 8 cleaners in one building, 4 in another, 5 in another. These could be cleaning teams in different departments, different sites within a large organisation, or cleaning teams in completely separate cleaning contracts. In all cases, there will be at least one person in each team that could act as a trainer to that team. This is one of the most effective, productive and cost efficient way of delivering organisation-wide training.
• Long Term Training Plans – The greatest disadvantage to using external trainers is that they cannot deliver long term training, it’s just way too expensive. However, internal trainers have the space and time to develop and deliver training that stretches over months rather than hours. They can choose to deliver regular bite-sized training sessions or longer more intensive sessions.
• Specific Skills Development – Cleaning is a multidisciplinary job that relies on cleaners recalling specific skills and knowledge to perform specific tasks. It’s quite rare for cleaners to have all skills and knowledge required to perform any cleaning task in a building, so across an organisation you will have cleaners with a mix of different skills and abilities. Using a training needs assessment only an internal trainer will be able to identify the specific skills required at a local level.
• Phase Returns & Mentoring – After an extended leave of absence due to illness, recovery or maternity, it makes sense for an internal trainer close to the person to act as a one-to-one mentor to welcome back the person and refresh the training they need over a period of time.

What are the pitfalls of internal trainers?
There are many advantages, but it’s not without risks. Here are the major disadvantages:

• Knowledgeable people do not always make good trainers – Just because a person is skilled in a task does not automatically mean they can teach it. Training to be a trainer is a separate but highly valued skill that must be learnt. Our Train-the-Trainer course teaches this valuable skill.
• Time cost of being a trainer – it takes time and costs for someone taking on the role of a trainer, it takes them away from routine tasks and responsibilities.
• Introducing old and bad habits – There’s always the risk of introducing bad habits into the training programmes when you rely on experienced staff
• Limited future skills development – One of the major advantages to external trainers is bringing new perspectives, fresh ideas and new skills, something that is limited with internal trainers. We can supply content and guidance in new skills to the internal trainer.

What do you need to build the complete internal trainer’s system?
The complete internal trainer’s system is based around our Train-the-Trainer course which is specifically designed to teach someone how to design and develop practical-based, cleaning-based courses. But we don’t stop there, we don’t just leave you once you have completed the course. Our support system starts when the new trainer-to-be starts the course, the support then follows them in the first year with guidance as they design and deliver their first training course.

Our complete internal trainer’s system is made up of 6 stages:

1. Train-the-Trainer Course – The main course
2. Training Needs Assessment – The course teaches you to define your training goals, what do you want to achieve? Who needs training and in what subjects? We can supply additional guidance and materials, and review any assessment
3. Course Design – Those training goals will need to be turned into concrete learning objectives, and in turn into logical structured lesson plans. We can supply additional guidance and support and review any lesson plans.
4. Assessment Design – Being able to accurately recall and apply the skills in the workplace is the goal to training, so you must know if they have learnt the skills you have taught them. We can supply additional guidance and support in the design of the assessment.
5. Evaluation and Validation – Once a course (or courses) have been created, we can evaluate the content, structure, flow, and assessments and validate under the Cleaning Masterclass certified training system.
6. Long-term Support – We can offer long term support and guidance with all aspects of course design and implementation