Asked: My training department is looking for help identifying best practices for both trainer prep time and co-training or co-facilitation guidelines. Can you refer us to an article, book, etc. that could assist in helping us develop our standards?

Answered: Design time

I have read you should plan for anywhere from 10 to 30 hours of design time to one hour of classroom time and experienced close to the same. One of the rules of project management is not to estimate time without knowing the resource. What might take me 20 hours might take someone doing it daily half the time.

Estimating time on a task is dependent on many variables: experience, frequency, content knowledge, etc. At the very least, I would think your group might want to categorize their estimates into things like the following:

High Subject matter expertise

Some subject matter expertise

No subject matter expertise

Co-facilitating

I have personally always negotiated rules given the preferences of my co-facilitator. These rules surround things like: when to interject, how to transition, how/when to support with materials or operating the video projector, etc. I don't know of any standards although they would be easy enough to set within a group of people.

Betsy Allen is senior vice president of The Bob Pike Group. Concurrent sessions on designing high impact training, including Designing High Impact Interactive Participant-Centered Training presented by Bob Pike, are part of The Pike Ascent to be held September 28-October 3, 2008 in Minneapolis. For more information,click here.