I work for a public accounting firm as the Trainer/Scheduler. One of my responsibilities is to train the accountants who teach the technical topics to new employees. The objective is not to turn them into professional trainers. I am just trying to help them connect better with their participants and be a little more effective in these efforts.

Does anyone have any suggestions on a short program outline I could use, or some best practices I could share with them?

Baby steps -- Buy a copy of "Preventing Death by Lecture" and "How to Give it So They Get It" for each of them (the books are only like 8 bucks a piece) and then, most importantly -- someone must observe their progress, hold them accountable to applying the content and give them constructive feedback.

(I have absolutely no affiliation with Sharon Bowman. I have simply experienced a lot of success using them with new and experienced trainers alike.)

Will these accountants be teaching new employees in a group setting (classroom) or one-on-one? If it's one-on-one, the approach used will be very different, especially for technical topics.

Typically non-training professionals are focused on what people need to know about their topic. This usually has very little value to employees because they don't learn how to actually use what they are being taught on the job.

What I suggest is to create a model of what you think technical training should be in your organization and work with non-training professionals on how to use and adapt this model for their topic. This should include coming up with a good set of objectives for their presentation.

The key is to focus them on improving the training they do rather than becoming better trainers for all situations.

If you're looking for something fast and easy to do, I'd have your trainers assemble what employees can read and study about a topic for a couple of our and then bring them together with the expert to discuss how to use what they've read or studied on the job.

The OP stated, "I am just trying to help them connect better with their participants and be a little more effective in these efforts."

So I wrote my response assuming that a well-seasoned instructional designer would actually design a structured learning experience and coach the SMEs, and that the SME-turned-facilitator simply needed to know how not to just ramble on about his/her topic.

So... OP... do you have an experienced instructional designer and an experienced trainer who can create the training and coach the trainers? They should already be well-armed with best practices. If you don't have those people (or one person who is experienced with both), who is going to hold them accountable to employing good facilitation skills? Who is going to coach them? How will they know if they're doing it well?

...confused...