How to Validate if your Internal Trainers or External Trainers are 'truly experts' ??

Dear HR , Training and Learning & Development Heads,

Recently I was posted a question by an employer to find the best expert trainer in negotiation.  The requirement from the client: This expert needs to have ‘book’ smart principles, ‘street’ smart principles and most importantly he needs to be constantly negotiating with everyone.  The question raised by me to this employer:  If this expert (trainer) has another business e.g. maybe a restaurant/ or a hotel ,or he is a member of any NGO’s  he can apply negotiation skills through his line of work and hence having the ‘book’ smart/ ‘street’ smart and having a constant practitioner approach will certainly apply.  However this got me thinking to my article below:

Based on the current book which I am halfway reading ‘The Millionaire Messenger’, the author Brandon Burchard shared that:

·         Experts are students first & that you can go research any topic and become an ‘expert’ in that area if you want too.

·     They are experts through practices with their past customers and further readings and researching about the topic.

·       He further says ‘ You don’t need to have ever done something to be considered  an expert in it and you don’t need to be a ‘results’ expert, all you need to do is put 10000 hours = 3 years of similar experience.

To validate his claim above, here is the authors justifications:

Napoleon Hill was never rich. His book on ‘Think and Grow Rich’ only made him rich because he took great amounts of time interviewing & kept on interviewing rich people on their thoughts and best practices. Until today, people are still paying to buy his books and hear trainers train on this subject.

Hence to really validate if your Internal Trainers or External Trainers are ‘experts’ you can only validate through this questions:

·         Have your trainer studied about the program, participants and  needs of the industry?

·         Is your trainer really passionate…

·         Is your trainer a giver or a taker (is he very selfish to share more than what is asked for)

·     Does your trainer knows about best practices within your industry and keep on upgrading his thoughts and ways of training?

Until my next article,

Have a good day