A Corporate trainer is a program specialist employed or engaged by an organization for the purposes of designing, developing, implementing and maintaining an education, learning and development program for employees.
Features
Each organization has corporate and cultural expectations of the roles and responsibilities played by a corporate trainer. However, most corporate trainers share specific duties in disseminating new hire orientation information, developmental or certification workshops for employees, and exit or separation interviews and evaluations. In some companies, training functions are distributed among several human resources generalists, but in others, dedicated full-time personnel handle training. In others, the entire corporate training function is outsourced to a third-party vendor that is brought in on an as-needed basis.
Requirements
A corporate trainer ordinarily has a background in communications, marketing, education or business. Entry-level corporate trainers routinely work as part of a larger team in the preparation of training materials, such as presentations and handbooks. Experienced corporate trainers who bring multiple years of proficiency to the task often lead presentations, provide explanations, and undergo evaluation and assessment of employees during workshops or training sessions.
Responsibilities
Companies typically charge corporate trainers with a specific educational mandate---such as the creation and implementation of a learning and development program, or the design and execution of a one-time or recurring topical workshop. These can vary from new employee orientations, procedure sessions, and facilitation conferences, to workshops designed to promote a specific product or service or mediations to explore controversial or contentious topics in the workplace.
Value
Corporate trainers are considered internal staff personnel who are not directly responsible for generating revenues for the business. During downsizing and redundancy operations, businesses may terminate corporate trainers to reduce the head-count in human resources and operations personnel.
Agencies
Professional agencies and associations exist to outsource the entire corporate training function, or to transform it into a modular delivery vehicle. For example, the Society for Human Resource Management, or SHRM, has an extensive corporate training division and enables its individual and corporate members to purchase or license training white papers and documents on a routine basis. As a general trend, corporate training has been seeing a gradual outsourcing in recent years, but top performing companies, such as Google and Apple, cite the integral value of an in-house training department.
