39 Best Facilitation Training Courses

Facilitation training teaches you to effectively guide groups, manage meetings, and lead workshops or training sessions. It often focuses on enhancing your ability to support a group in achieving its objectives (e.g. “Quarterly OKR planning”), making decisions, or solving problems together. To get there, you frequently learn and practice various facilitation techniques and methods.

You should consider facilitation training if you hold direct responsibility for the success and quality of group collaboration (e.g. as a team lead) or if you plan to run regular meetings, workshops, events, and training sessions (e.g. as part of a project). In those cases, you and the people you work with can benefit from your newly acquired skills in coordinating discussions, leading projects, or organizing team efforts. Plus, these skills are incredibly transferable and valued across various industries and roles.

In facilitation training, you'll learn skills such as effective communication, active listening, conflict resolution, and how to encourage participation from all group members. Additionally, you'll gain techniques for planning and organizing meetings or workshops that are engaging and goal-oriented.

These skills not only make you a better facilitator but also enhance your overall leadership and teamwork abilities. But be careful: Once you know how to facilitate, you might be spoiled and become quickly frustrated in badly run meetings. We speak from experience.

Consider your primary learning goal (e.g. “Growing my confidence”), the right format to suit your schedule (e.g. online vs in-person), and what your or your organization's budget is. Use these three metrics to filter down the available training and courses and then take a closer look.

Look for programs that match your experience level and read closely the reviews, especially of previous participants who work in a similar context as you do.

The most important part of a facilitation training course is that it involves hands-on practice and exploration of facilitation techniques and methods. Unlike many other skills, facilitation is a skill that you use in real-time and in front of other people (e.g. running a stand-up meeting). So, there is no time to Google and you have to make quick decisions. Therefore, it’s vital that a course offers you the opportunity to gather experience and confidence and to internalize what you learn.

Facilitation training often covers a variety of tools and frameworks. This includes learning about specific methodologies (e.g. Liberating Structures or TOP), and tools (like Miro or SessionLab). Most of the time, you are not required to know about these in advance, but instead, you can expect to learn how to use them as part of the training. Some courses specifically dive into individual methodologies or tools.

To get your organization to pay for the training, prepare to demonstrate how the skills acquired will benefit your team or the company. Since research shows that 71% of meetings are considered unproductive, there is a lot of ground to gain for you.

Often you need to submit a formal request to your manager or HR department before enrolling in a course. If you need help with that, you can read through our reimbursement guide and template. You can adapt this to suit any course.

Yes, many facilitation training programs offer scholarships (e.g. to balance economic purchasing power) or flexible payment options to make the training more accessible. Some might also provide discounts for early registration and options for installment payments. We recommend you to sign up for any newsletters you find on the course page, so you can take advantage of opportunities like this.

Yes, facilitation can significantly help in your career transition or advancement. The skills learned in facilitation training, such as leadership, communication, and problem-solving, are highly transferable and sought after in many roles and industries. Being great at facilitation is very visible to other people and can set you apart in your role, open up new opportunities, or get you in line for a salary increase. Especially in fields where group collaboration is key.

At Facilitator School, we believe that – generally speaking – people have more to benefit from participating in well-done training that’s online than in-person. First, because our experience is that people nowadays have more online meetings and workshops than face-to-face. And secondly, because learning how to effectively work together online is a tougher nut to crack, so there is more for you to learn. Plus you often save yourself the headache of accommodation and travel.

That being said, it’s important to make sure the online training is well done and that you don’t find yourself in 2-hour theory lectures. And if you primarily run in-person sessions, then absolutely go with in-person training to maximize your skills in that area.

Many facilitation courses (ours included) offer personalized facilitation certification. This is a great addition to any CV because facilitation is a skill that bridges all industries and roles.

But be aware that there is no formal institute to verify certificates. What this means for you is that there is no difference among the certificates of course/training providers, because all of them are just certifications of completion. The skills and experiences you gain are often more important than the certification itself.

Coaching and peer support are valuable components of effective facilitation training. Coaching provides you with personalized feedback and guidance and helps you to directly tackle the specific challenges of your unique work environment. Peer support allows you to connect with other people to learn from their experiences, create some accountability, and make the learning more fun and social.