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One idea that stayed with me from the World of Learning conference is how much potential there is in enabling subject-matter experts to deliver learning across organisations. When organisations want to scale instructor-led training, theres a limit to how many professional trainers and facilitators they can hire or bring in. But they already have a lot of expertise inside the business. Experienced managers who could contribute to leadership development programs. Sales experts who know how to handle difficult customer situations. Technical specialists who understand what happens beyond what’s in the manual. It's really valuable to learn from people who actually do the job every day. They know the real situations, the exceptions and the judgement calls. And they can bring this practical experience into a training session in a way that a slide deck alone cannot. The challenge, of course, is that being an expert in something doesn't automatically make you a good trainer or facilitator. I recently heard an L&D team describe one of those familiar situations with SMEs: 60 slides prepared for a 30-minute training session. 😅 The expertise is there, but turning it into a good learning experience is a different skill. And we can't expect all these people to become professional instructional designers and trainers on top of their regular jobs. 👉 So SME enablement is a really important part of scaling high-quality learning. And that means quite a few streams of work for L&D teams: → Helping SMEs turn their expertise into well-designed learning sessions, with realistic exercises and opportunities to practise. → Creating facilitator guides and reusable materials that make it easier for them to prepare and deliver. → Developing their facilitation and training skills, with opportunities for practice and coaching. → Having a way to collect feedback, maintain quality and improve programs as more people deliver them. What I find particularly interesting is how L&D teams can make this support repeatable across an organisation, without having to start from scratch with every new SME or training program. We're working on this area quite a lot at SessionLab at the moment, exploring how to make it easier for L&D teams to prepare and support more people from the business to deliver high-quality learning. Because there is already so much valuable expertise inside organisations. The opportunity is to help more people share it in a way that others can actually learn from. #LearningAndDevelopment #InstructorLedTraining #Facilitation

What an inspiring couple of days at the World of Learning conference at Birmingham! 🙌 So many interesting conversations with people working in L&D, talent development, leadership development, training and facilitation. A few themes that stood out from the conversations: -› the collaboration with SMEs while designing instructor-led training programs is a challenge to do it efficiently. -› a lots of design / redesign of existing training programs is going on, and a pressure to do it quickly and at a high quality. -› Scaling programs where L&D teams increasingly rely on managers, internal trainers, SMEs and other skilled people from the organization to deliver - this has so many operational challenges to do it well. And of course, facilitation! 💚 As much as facilitation was a quite niche topic here, it was particularly nice to see how our focus on it made SessionLab stand out. And even better to meet people who are actively working on building facilitation capabilities inside their organizations. These are all topics we're focusing a lot at SessionLab, so I really enjoyed the chance to chat and exchange perspectives with so many people. It was also an experience on its own to run a roundtable seminar on Facilitation Operations. In hindsight, it’s fun to observe my own mental battle: I am _extremely_ nervous whenever I need to PRESENT... 😅 . And I am so much more at ease when I need to FACILITATE 🤘 It was also our first time exhibiting at a conference like this, and quite an experience for the team. A lot of learning, a lot of fun, and plenty of good conversations along the way. And one of my personal highlights was finally meeting and chatting in person with some amazing people we've collaborated for a while from the facilitation and L&D community, including Melanie Martinelli and Zoë Lord! Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth, and to the SessionLab team for making it such a memorable experience! - Polina Stolpovskaya, Carrin Robertson, Deborah Rim Moiso, James Smart, Filip Kis, Andy Pearson 🙌 #wol2026 #WorldOfLearning #LearningAndDevelopment #Facilitation

World of Learning Birmingham 2026 is over! And what a ride it was 🙌🎉 I had a chance to speak to so many L&D and talent development people, leadership development, wonderful trainers and facilitators from different backgrounds. Companies (Wagamama, NVIDIA, Domino’s, Thermo Fischer, you name it), official departments (His Majesty Office, Ministries, multiple police departments), other exhibitors, mentors and speakers. Even a wonderful L&D lady from Interpol. 😄 Whirlwind of good talks, laughter, and discussing instructor-led training and facilitation, or as I call it – human-led experiences. On behalf of SessionLab, I want to say thank you to the conference team for making it so smooth and well-organized for exhibitors. 💚 And if you forget what we do - SessionLab is the software to design and coordinate instructor-led training and facilitation. 😄 Cheers to the team for making it happen! Carrin Robertson 💚 James Smart Deborah Rim Moiso Robert Cserti Filip Kis Andy Pearson, and the rest of them team who supported us remotely. #worldoflearning #wol #wol2026 #ld

A couple of day ago I ran a SessionLab Community session on creating Facilitator Guides. (And preparing for such events is always a good opportunity to test the limits of our product :) We increasingly work with L&D teams where a smaller group of learning designers / facilitators create the program, and a much wider circle of trainers, SMEs, managers or internal facilitators eventually needs to deliver it. And in that setup, the package that the facilitator gets needs to contain quite a lot of assets - ideally, everything that someone with subject matter expertise and some facilitation training needs to pick up the program and deliver it well. So for the demo, I wanted to see how much of that whole workflow I could actually build in SessionLab in less than 30 minutes. I obviously used our AI Assistant quite heavily to make it fit into our time constraints. But even knowing the product pretty well, I was genuinely impressed by how far we’ve come. Starting with a fictional email exchange between an L&D manager and their client, I went through: → turning that conversation into a structured needs assessment → creating a detailed draft agenda for a full-day experiential training → generating trainer scripts for briefing activities and explaining theory blocks → creating the accompanying slide deck → producing a print-ready facilitator guide → creating participant handouts → adding a retrospective template where facilitators can capture their reflections after delivery → creating a feedback form for participants …And then turning the whole thing into a reusable package that can be handed over to the trainers who will actually facilitate the session. 🙌 If I think back to what SessionLab could do a year or two ago compared with this, I have to say I’m pretty proud of what our team has built 👏 Of course, the devil is in the details. I would definitely NOT design a full-day leadership training from scratch and ram through all these steps in 30 minutes in real life. There is a lot of thinking, iteration and human judgment that needs to happen during these steps to create a training program that is going to be delivered to hundreds of people. But being able to move through the whole workflow and get genuinely useful and relevant drafts at every stage so effortlessly was mindblowing 🎉 If you want to see the whole workflow, you can find the link the first comment

So you trained 300 facilitators. What next? What happens after you’ve trained people in #facilitation, with the aim of building an internal facilitator pool? Of course, that’s not the end of the story. There is still a long way to go from having people with facilitation skills to having an active pool of facilitators ready to take on real work across the organisation. In one organization I spoke with, L&D started systematically training employees on facilitation skills. Two years later, 300 people had been trained. On paper, a brilliant result! 🎉 But the infrastructure around them was still mostly a Google Sheet, a group chat and an email list - and a lot of committed people doing extra work alongside their actual jobs. And over time, some surprisingly basic questions became hard to answer: → Who is still actively facilitating? → Who has time to take the next request? → How do newer facilitators get real practice? → How does learning from one workshop benefit the next one? → Who needs support to keep improving? → What impact are these people having? I’m hearing different versions of this elsewhere too. Another L&D team had trained 125 people, but only around 20 were actively accepting facilitation work. The training had given people the basic skills to facilitate. But the system around them hadn’t turned that trained capacity into a repeatable practice or organizational capability. After facilitation training, people still need: ✅ Real opportunities to facilitate ✅ Time and support from their managers ✅ Clear processes and resources that make getting started easier ✅ Peer observation, co-facilitation and useful feedback to actually develop ✅ A way for lessons from one session to benefit the next facilitator Facilitation training is a really important starting point, but training alone is not yet a system. 300 people trained in facilitation sounds great on paper. The harder part is making sure those skills actually get used, developed and connected to real organisational needs.

Do you facilitate workshops, training programs, meetings or events, or know someone who does? Every year, SessionLab asks facilitators around the world how their work is changing. This year we're exploring growth: how facilitators grow professionally, and how facilitation takes root inside organizations. Add your voice to the State of Facilitation survey. Respondents get early access to the report, plus a package of facilitation resources 🎁 Know a facilitator? Send this their way. 👉 https://lnkd.in/dv62kAem #Facilitation #StateOfFacilitation #WorkshopDesign #LearningAndDevelopment