Facilitation and workshopping are becoming increasingly sought-after skills, as companies recognize the impact this combination of techniques and processes has on team productivity, efficiency, and outcomes, as well as overall company growth.
As a career choice, facilitation is also growing in popularity. Individuals are drawn to train in facilitation because this skill set enables them to work flexibly, for multiple different industries, in an impactful, diverse, and lucrative career that offers new challenges and rewards every single day. With the growing demand for facilitators in every sector, these are skills that will hold their value over the long term. It’s also a lot of fun!
However, despite this boom in interest in facilitation, and the growing mountain of evidence to support its efficacy, the term ‘facilitation’ is still not widely in use. This makes bringing together the right people with the companies which need them a tricky task, from both sides of the recruitment table.
In this article, we’ll be:
- Providing a comprehensive list of where to find facilitation roles and the search terms you’ll need to find them
- Looking at the range of expectations on facilitators, and the different job descriptions you might encounter during your job hunt
- Covering the multitude of job positions and titles that incorporate facilitation skills
- Running through the general skills you’ll need to master to land a facilitation role
- Giving you some simple, actionable steps to follow to help you land your first job in the field
Excited to learn more? Then off we go!
Why does the facilitator job description vary so much?
Facilitation and workshopping are not new concepts; individuals who guide group workshops to bring out the potential of a team and lead them towards a common goal have always existed in every kind of organization.
However, traditionally, employees who organize and lead workshops hold other positions within the same company as well. They might be product leads, project managers, a CEO, or a CTO. Crucially, these individuals have in-depth knowledge of the problem being addressed, are already familiar with the team, and have a vested interest in the outcome of the meeting. Although this might have previously been seen as an advantage, what we now know is that a successful workshop requires a facilitator who has total objectivity from the team, challenge, and product. This ensures that outcomes of the workshop are guided by the process, rather than internal agendas. As this becomes more widely recognized, so too does the importance of the role of the facilitator as a profession in and of itself.
However, despite the huge steps being made in the field, facilitation as a career choice is still a relatively new concept. For this reason, organizations tend to interpret the responsibilities and duties which fall under the facilitator job title slightly differently. For the time being, while facilitation continues to grow in importance and popularity, its definition can vary considerably from company to company, and from industry to industry, as team leaders figure out what they want or need from the person coming in to do that role. This is likely to remain the case until the positive outcomes of workshopping become even more mainstream.
While not having a standard job description to refer to can be challenging for those new to the field, this ambiguity is also an opportunity for new recruits to shape the role within the organization they’re coming into and to educate others on the value of workshops.
What skills and requirements can I expect to see in a facilitation job description?
As we’ve seen, facilitator job descriptions can vary significantly from company to company, as well as between industries. However, there are some fundamental skills and requirements which you will be expected to have when applying for almost any facilitation position. Here’s a rundown of the key hard and soft skills you’ll need to have under your belt when you launch your facilitation career. (For more detail, check out this post we wrote all about facilitation skills!)
Hard skills
As a facilitator, whether in-house or working on a contractual basis, you’ll need to demonstrate your ability to:
- Put collaboration methods into practice
- Guide, support, and bring out the potential of a team and its members
- Educate the team in the best ways to define and meet goals
- Encourage data-backed decisions and provide examples
- Reduce or eliminate assumptions
- Create and implement efficient processes
- Move teams through ideation, prototyping and testing phases rapidly
- Organize, manage, and run remote facilitations
- Demonstrate expertize in the online facilitation tools needed to run virtual workshops
Onboarding these specific techniques and knowledge will be a great starting point to any facilitation career. However, there are a range of key personal attributes, traits, and soft skills you’ll also need to exemplify to potential employers, recruiters, and teams if you are to successfully set your facilitation career in motion.
Soft skills
When you start running your first workshops, you’ll need to display:
- An objective approach to ensure that outcomes of the workshop are guided by the process itself, rather than internal agendas or personal bias
- Excellent organizational skills to communicate expectations for each activity, keep teams focused on the task at hand, and conclude each task fully
- Empathy and understanding as well as the ability to listen to different perspectives and encourage healthy debate
- Authenticity to build trust with the group
- Assertiveness and confidence to keep the group focused, the conversation on topic, the activities within the allotted time frame, and to ensure no time is wasted on anything that does not work towards producing a positive outcome
- Clear, precise, and engaging conversational skills to keep motivation levels high, ask the right questions, and enable everyone to understand the trickier aspects of the workshop
- Willingness to adapt, be flexible, and improvise as the situation requires it
- Ability to keep the group’s energy levels high
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What roles come under the facilitation umbrella?
When you begin looking for roles in facilitation, you might find that simply entering the word ‘facilitator’ in a job site search box does not necessarily produce the results you’re hoping for. As we’ve discussed, with facilitation as a career choice still a relatively new concept in most industries, companies and HR departments are still learning the right terminology to attract the right candidates. What this means is that you’ll often find a range of different job titles which, although they may not contain the word facilitation at all, require the skills and traits of a facilitator and describe similar responsibilities and duties.
When searching for your first position in the field, you might find it helpful to experiment with different search terms. Titles such as ‘Agile Coach’, ‘Workshop Moderator’, ‘Design Thinking Facilitator’, ‘Business Design and Strategy Facilitator’ and ‘Team Collaboration Coach’, will all yield results that fall under the more generic term, ‘facilitation’. You can also try combinations of these search terms, for example, ‘Agile Facilitator’, or ‘Workshop Coach’, and synonyms of the term ‘Facilitator’ such as ‘Lead’ or ‘Trainer’.
We’ve collected together some job titles which have job descriptions, duties, and responsibilities which fall under the facilitation umbrella to give you an idea of what you’re likely to come across when searching for workshopping and facilitation positions.
Leadership Program Facilitator/Trainer Lead, Citi
The focus of the Leadership Program Facilitator/Trainer Lead position at Citi is on leading workshops that enable the organization's senior leaders to reach their full potential. The position requires a facilitator to guide both in-person and virtual group sessions to maximize the group’s learning, develop their leadership skills, and create an awareness of the role these leaders play in numerous aspects of the business, such as driving company culture, nurturing and developing talent, and boosting business performance.
Key responsibilities include:
- Facilitating discussions
- Creating a motivational, inspiring learning experience
- Achieving learning objectives
- Managing the environment of the session (as well as pre- and post-session activities)
Principle skills required are:
- Exceptional questioning skills
- Outstanding facilitation skills
- Ability to handle challenging discussions
- A talent for connecting concepts and skills to team member roles
- Ability to synthesize/summarize key points in a discussion
Innovation Hubs Facilitator, Vodafone
Vodafone’s Innovation Hubs Facilitator position is an opportunity to oversee the running of innovation sessions with the company’s business customers. The goal of the facilitator is to pass on insights in the latest technologies and demonstrate how these technologies can improve their customers' businesses. With a focus on sales, the facilitator is responsible for helping drive revenue by ensuring workshops enable opportunities to progress.
Key responsibilities include:
- Organizing, planning, and leading engaging customer workshops (virtual and in-person)
- Demonstrating sales and the pipeline generated by the innovation sessions
- Creating customer journeys and storyboards
- Developing new content for bespoke customer workshops
Principle skills required are:
- Excellent organizational skills and facilitation experience
- Confident presentation skills
- Ability to communicate articulately
- A desire to iterate and improve processes
Agile Coach, Flixbus
Flixbus are seeking an Agile Coach to help drive the company to the next level. As well as one-on-one coaching, the fostering of collaboration, and the promotion of team self-organization, the Agile Coach is expected to facilitate meetings for the product teams, leadership team, and business stakeholders, moderate decision-making sessions, and identify roadblocks.
Key responsibilities include:
- Facilitation of meetings for all teams and business stakeholders
- Individual coaching
- Identify impediments
- Foster team collaboration, conflict resolution, and decision-making
Principle skills required are:
- Knowledge of agile and lean principles
- Experience working with high-performing teams
- Facilitation skills, creating and running domain-wide workshops
- Empathy and a positive attitude
- Ability to communicate in a clear and precise way
Workshop Facilitator, BOP Industries
BOP Industries is looking for a Workshop Facilitator to enable the company to deliver on educational topics such as innovation and technology, sustainability, and business within schools, corporations, and organizations. Delivering content on a range of topics to a variety of different audiences, the top priority of the Workshop Facilitator is to ensure the learning of students in an enjoyable and safe environment.
Key responsibilities include:
- Running enjoyable and educational workshops
- Delivering outcomes
- Preparing workshops and the corresponding material
- Supporting Lead Facilitator
- Liaising with clients and parents
Principle skills required are:
- Clear communication
- Time management
- Engaging facilitation style
Human-Centered Design (design thinking) Facilitator, Ally Financial
Utilizing design thinking and other human-centered design methodologies, the team at the human-centered design studio, TM Studio, with Ally Financial builds empathy with consumers, brainstorms solutions, and rapidly prototypes and tests concepts. The Facilitator is expected to organize and lead both short, focused workshops of a few hours, as well as longer sessions of two or three days, depending on the scope of the project and expected outcomes.
Key responsibilities:
- Engaging stakeholders to define workshop goals and articulate problems
- Mapping out and preparing workshop activities
- Facilitating workshops in-person and remotely
- Providing post-workshop follow-up reports
- Developing training programs to teach design thinking
Principle skills required are:
- Empathy
- Creativity
- Collaboration
- Sensitive communication
- Curiosity and desire to learn
Innovation Coach, Roche
Roche is looking for a Lean Innovation & Business Model Coach who will empower teams and business leaders with sessions on entrepreneurship. The company seeks to promote a lean business model to its workshop participants.
Key responsibilities:
- Coaching lean and agile principles
- Leading and facilitating business model demo sessions
- Creating resources needed for training and development
- Leading regular coaching sessions
- Supporting, advising, and training team leads in strategic growth questions and decision making
Principle skills/areas of expertise required are:
- Experience with corporate accelerators, startup accelerators, corporate innovation labs, corporate innovation units, startup incubators
- Experience in Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Lean Business Model Development, Agile, Lean Analytics, Traction Modeling
- Experience as a coach, facilitator, or mentor within a corporate or startup environment
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Where can I find facilitation jobs?
Looking for jobs is never easy, but when you’re searching for facilitation roles it can be even harder to know where to start. While you’ll certainly have some luck with traditional job boards such as LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, Glassdoor, FlexJobs, ZipRecruiter, and Ladders, particularly if you incorporate a mixture of some of the search terms we’ve talked about, it’s also a good idea to check out facilitation-focused jobs sites such as Butter Community and Miro.
It’s also worth taking your search to startup-specific job boards. Startups, being by nature entrepreneurial and fast-paced, tend to embrace agile methods, facilitation, and workshopping. For this reason, you’re more likely to find jobs related to facilitation and coaching than on job websites favored by larger or more traditional corporations (check out sites like Angel.co, Startup.jobs, Startupers, VentureLoop, Crunchboard, Mashable, WeWorkRemotely, Authentic Jobs, GitHub, Stack Overflow, WorkInStartups, UnicornHunt, YCombinator).
Searching for facilitation jobs: What should my next steps be?
Let’s take a look at some of the key steps you can take to improve your chances on the job market.
- Attend events
Getting out there and talking to people is always a good idea when you’re looking for a new job. It’s an even better idea if you’re branching out into a new career. Whether they’re virtual or in person, attending industry meetups is a sure-fire way to learn more about your new career choice, stay up to date on current trends in the field, and be the first to hear about any new job opportunities as soon as they come up. Check out local UX design and usability events, panel talks, and lectures. You’ll find many also include the chance for drinks and networking after, so be brave and talk to people!
- Find your medium
Charting your journey into facilitation is a great strategy for building an online presence. It’s also proof of your passion for your new career that you can demonstrate in job interviews.
Here are some ways you can share your journey and learnings:
- Write a blog post on your website, LinkedIn or Medium.
- Produce and publish a podcast
- Film short videos and upload them to a YouTube channel
- Use social media to post short insights or inspirational ideas
Whichever medium you feel most comfortable with, the important thing is to produce quality content about your facilitation journey that others can learn from or be inspired by. Your content could include:
- What you’ve learned as you build up your experience in facilitation
- New and interesting techniques or approaches
- Challenges you’ve faced along the way
- Book, website, or podcast reviews
- Interviews with leading figures in facilitation
- Inspirational stories you’ve been inspired by
You’ll find that creating and sharing high-quality content is a really effective method in helping you become an authority in your field, get found by recruiters, and have something tangible to share with both the facilitation community and in job interviews.
- Send prospective applications
It’s not always the case that the companies you most admire are advertising for a role you can fill. However, sending a prospective application to companies you’d really love to work for is a means to getting your name on the desk of the recruitment team, demonstrating your passion for what the organization is doing, and ensuring your name is at the top of the list when they are hiring for a facilitator. You could even put together a short use case on how your facilitation skills could help the company.
- Start facilitating in your current job
While you’re still applying for positions and building your experience, you can gain valuable insights by offering to facilitate meetings and workshops in your current job. You can do this in a small-scale way, by offering to manage and host the weekly standup, or, if you’re feeling confident, you could volunteer to run the retrospective of a product launch. If your employer is receptive to the idea, you could even suggest the idea of a Sprint to address a major challenge. Whichever type of workshop you do facilitate, this is an opportunity to try out different techniques, get feedback from your team, and learn your own facilitation style. Most importantly, it’s a really good way of building your confidence before you are standing in front of a room full of strangers. Don’t forget to chart your progress on your blog!
We hope our guide to facilitator job descriptions has given you some concrete steps for successfully navigating the facilitation job search! To find out more about careers in facilitation and workshopping check out some of our other posts!
How to Boost Your Career with Design Sprints (Even If You’re Not in UX)
Where Could a Career in Facilitation Take You? Freelance vs. In-House
