Posted by on Aug 20, 2016 in Career Insights | 0 questions

When you’re pursuing a certain career, building up your skills and mastering new processes is extremely fulfilling. However, once you become a true expert in your niche, it can feel like you’ve hit a wall.

Even though you’re managing some pretty hard tasks, you may feel like you’re not really going anywhere. If this sounds familiar, then you may be interested in a career in training and development. Here’s a post to help you decide if this career is for you.

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We’ll start by going over the skills you’ll need for a career in training and development. Unfortunately, having massive amounts of knowledge in one specific field doesn’t qualify you to teach others about it. Oral and written communication skills are one of the most fundamental things you’ll need when choosing this kind of career path. You’ll not only have to write with a clear and engaging voice, but also talk to large and small groups of people with confidence and authority.

Interpersonal skills are another important trait for anyone who wants to pursue a career in training and development. After all, the entire niche deals with communicating with a wide range of people. You’ll need to be a fantastic listener, which will allow you to better identify the needs of an audience, and tweak certain details about the seminar or lesson that you’re giving. It’s also an important skill to be able to read into body language and generally being perceptive to people’s reactions. Everyone receives teaching differently, and if you want to be effective in training and development you need to be able to change your delivery according to how an audience is receiving something. Because you may be working as a consultant, being able to develop healthy and beneficial relationships with complete strangers is essential.

Technological know-how is extremely important for people who work in the training niche. This is especially true in 2016. Technology is rapidly developing all the time, and various developments have totally warped the way a modern office operates. Professional services like these Paulson ProMolder seminars are characterised by new, cutting-edge approaches to learning. If you were sent to a seminar and the speaker was struggling to use a projector, I’m sure you wouldn’t put much faith into what they were saying.

Like any career path, there are certain natural personality traits which can help you hit the ground running in training and development. You should be fairly extroverted, as a large part of your job is going to be talking to people you’ve never met before. Still, introverts can be pretty effective when they’re teaching something in a more technical niche.

Being creative and quick to come up with ideas will also help you determine the best way a given skill can be implemented at a business, or come up with scenarios to drive the point of a seminar home. Flexibility is another big one. Although you wouldn’t enter a session without a firm plan in place, unexpected questions and issues can come up, and you’ll need to think on your feet here and there.