Development is critical to both the quality of your program and to the motivation of your participants. When people volunteer for something, they usually want to do a good job. By providing them with the resources and support they need to improve their own skills, you’ll not only increase the quality of the trainings they teach, but your facilitators will view this support as a reward itself.

Investing time and resources to teach your facilitators the basics of effective facilitation so they feel confident in the classroom and equipped to handle any training scenario is important. At Google, g2g facilitators go through this Facilitation Bootcamp as a great first step in developing their foundational skills.

The course is designed to be a two-hour, interactive live workshop. The focus is more on facilitating group discussions and activities rather than presenting slides -- which is why the slide deck itself is very minimal! That was an intentional choice to make sure time is spent on group facilitation rather than presenting content.

You can easily adapt this workshop to be run virtually over Google Hangouts or a similar platform. Here’s three tips for making a virtual training work (more tips can be found in the appendix of the Participant Workbook):

1. Use breakout virtual rooms for small group discussions and exercises.
2. Use shared Google Docs (or other collaborative software) for participants to answer questions or do activities simultaneously.
3. Pause for a longer time (5-15 seconds, or even longer if you want to force participation) when waiting for verbal questions or responses to allow time for participants to un-mute.