Dave Chong · HRD Corp Train The Trainer
My Train The Trainer Study Journal
Day-by-day notes, takeaways and reflections as I work through the Train The Trainer course — written for myself, shared for anyone walking the same road.
About
Why this journal exists
I'm attending the HRD Corp Train The Trainer course, and writing things down is how I learn. This journal keeps my notes, takeaways and reflections from each day in one place — and holds me accountable to actually process what I'm taught, not just sit through it.
Journal
Day by day
Day 6
22 August 20262 entries
The Skill Nobody Guessed — Youth Connect 2026
"We don't get to choose only the good part." The day after the course ended, I sat in a room full of twenty-somethings at IQI Youth Connect and heard a creator with 158K followers name the skill that changed her life — and it was the one I had just spent a week studying.
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Are They Paying You? — Bryan Low at Youth Connect
"Being famous and broke is worse than just being broke." After the panel, Youth Connect handed the room to Bryan Low — 863K followers on Instagram, built in two years — and he spent an hour dismantling every romantic idea about content creation with a badminton racket in his hand.
Read entry →Day 4
20 August 20266 entries
Show Me the Evidence — Why Assessment Matters
"You can have a thousand expert opinions, but one test result with evidence is more powerful." Day 4 opens the assessment module with a fake engineer, a pen assessed four different ways, and a maths class that averaged 1.03.
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Sahih — Valid, Reliable, Fair, Flexible
"Kita nak tunjuk dia siapa berkuasa? Salah." The four principles of assessment, a gemstone with a certificate, a marker who read the scale backwards, and the rules that make evidence worth trusting.
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Itu Bukan Soalan — Items, Noise and the Test Paper
"Anda semua telah pun didedahkan dengan terminologi yang salah. Itu bukan soalan." What a test paper is really made of — items, key answers, noise — plus negative marking in medicine, a matching test that punished one mistake twice, and why your Instagram is a portfolio.
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Knowing Isn't Doing — Performance Assessment and Marking
A participant may understand a concept perfectly and still be unable to perform it. Checklists, rating scales, rubrics, the odd-versus-even Likert decision, five planning questions, and why the exam room needs a conducive soul.
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Did They Like It, Learn It, Use It — Did It Pay?
Assessing participants is half the job; the other half is assessing the training itself. Kirkpatrick's four levels, the CIRO cycle, the three-month evaluation window, and a sugar-cane stall that explains quality better than any slide.
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The 5 I's — and Tomorrow We Draw Lots
"Pilih topik yang menunjukkan kemahiran anda untuk mengajar — macam pertandingan menyanyi, pilih lagu yang boleh menunjukkan kemahiran anda." The five I's of a training session, the 20-60-20 shape of fifteen minutes, and the scoring sheet Friday will use on all of us.
Read entry →Day 3
19 August 202611 entries
Constructive Alignment — Two Flying Horses
"Your learning outcome, your training method and your assessment must be aligned to each other." A new trainer, a 150-year-old horse puzzle, and the one principle that decides whether Friday's fifteen minutes scores or crashes.
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The Course Outline — Ten Boxes and the HRD Corp Rulebook
"To make your life easy, you always calculate seven hours of training." The ten components every course outline needs — and the arithmetic of claimable hours, lunch breaks, split bills and the schedule you should never hand out.
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Design Day — Building 'AI Empowerment' in a Morning
"I never use from AI directly. I just get the idea." Our group designed a two-day AI course against the real templates, presented it, and took Martin's red pen — including exactly how to prompt AI for learning outcomes that survive an assessor.
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The Session Plan — A Script That Never Leaves the House
"Is this like a script? Yeah, it's like a script — but not a manual that talks for you." What a session plan actually is, why professionals write one, how the seating is part of it, and the one document HRD Corp never gets to see.
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GLOSS and OFF — The Grand Opening and the Proper Goodbye
"If you start very low energy, very nervous — your whole class is very nervous." Five moves to open a session and three to close it, the art of seeding your own Q&A, and why smart training companies always end by selling the next course.
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Lighten the Load — Building a Session Plan in Real Time
"If I see you write ten or fifteen types, I know your session will not be good — you stand here and speak like a machine gun." Watching a fifteen-minute session get planned live, three real plans under the red pen, and why nobody reads your draft at 2 AM.
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The CODE — Nobody Knows What You Wanted to Say
"Your voice is your most important tool as a trainer." Content, Organisation, Delivery, Entertaining — plus the six Ps of voice, the two-second rule for eye contact, and the single most liberating piece of stage-fright advice I have ever received.
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Facilitation — Hints, Not Answers
"If you tell the answer, your whole activity is spoiled." What Martin was actually doing while we wrestled with the flying horses, Tuckman's stages mapped onto our own Monday morning, the seven tensions every facilitator balances — and why you should never cold-call the quiet one.
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LACAV and the Parking Lot — Never Fake an Answer
"Never, never fake an answer — especially in our age, with all these AI." How to ask questions that land, the five-step LACAV sequence for handling the ones that come back, and the parking lot that keeps a session on track without ignoring anyone.
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Why We Remember — I Do, I Understand
"If you want to see certain things happen, you must over-emphasise. Repeat, repeat, repeat." The five reasons anything survives a training, the proverb that settles the lecture-versus-practice argument, and how chocolate on a Monday morning becomes desire to learn by Friday.
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Movie Stars, Blockers and Dominators — the Cast of Every Training Room
"Not every participant will like me. What to do? You get a thicker skin." The six challenging characters every trainer eventually meets, the hierarchy rule that stops you creating blockers by accident, and why a 5.0-star trainer rating is always fake.
Read entry →Day 2
18 August 202610 entries
Competency-Based Training — Masuk Tak Tahu, Keluar Tahu
"You masuk kelas, you tak tahu buat kek. You keluar kelas, you tahu buat kek." Day 2 opens the design module — and the first lesson is that a course is not designed from ideas, it is designed from the gap.
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Learning Outcomes — Head, Hands and Heart
A learning outcome is just a sentence — "at the end of the course, learners will be able to…" — but inside that sentence there must be a measurement, and behind it one of three domains: head, hands, or heart.
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Writing Learning Outcomes — SMART, ABCD and the Words That Tak Laku
"When you want to write a clear, specific outcome, you must write with only three words: a verb, an object, and a qualifier." The afternoon we learned to write the sentence properly — and the four words that got declared haram.
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Content Development — Big Rocks, the Jar and the LO as Heartbeat
"You punya LO salah, semua salah." Once the outcome is written, it becomes the heartbeat of the programme — it chooses the content, the scope, the sequence, even the name on the brochure.
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Training Methods — the Spectrum, the Trap and a Buzan Mind Map
"Kalau trainer tu suka lecture, lecture saja habis." Methods sit on a spectrum from teacher-centred to student-centred — and the worst way to choose one is the way most trainers do: by personal preference.
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Demonstration — Prepare the Student, Not the Equipment
"Preparation ini bukan sahaja untuk prepare equipment — it is to prepare the student." The method for the hands domain: four stages, a mnemonic borrowed from safety gear, and why you always carry a visual backup.
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Discussion — Parallel Thinking and the Quiet Room
"I like discussion. I feel — because I like facilitation." Two people is already a group, but without a topic and a facilitator it is just sembang — and the best techniques in the toolbox are built for the people who never speak.
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Role Play — the Method That Keeps Its Secret
Lecture, demonstration, discussion — you announce the learning outcome up front. Role play is different: "bila debriefing, baru you bagitahu what is the LO." Experience first, meaning after.
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Experiential Learning — What, So What, Now What
"Masa penat-penat tu, dia suruh duduk. Dia tanya — how do you feel?" The five-stage cycle that turns an activity into changed behaviour — and the facilitator who must ask everything and answer nothing.
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Training Aids — Props, Not the Core
"The core of all the training is still the trainer. All these are props." A tour of the toolbox — manuals, whiteboards, flipcharts, slides, video — and the craft details nobody teaches until something falls off the easel.
Read entry →Day 1
17 August 202617 entries
Ice Breakers, KitKats and Ground Rules
Before a single slide, our trainer made us live the principles she was about to teach — balloon games, chocolate rewards, and one engagement rule I'm stealing for every meeting I run.
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Learning ≠ Training
"I taught Stripe how to whistle." "I don't hear him whistling." "I said I taught him. I didn't say he learned it." A cartoon that quietly demolishes how most companies think about training.
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Four Theoretical Perspectives of Learning
Behaviourist, cognitivist, constructivist, collaborativist — four different answers to what learning actually is, and a good trainer picks the right one for each learning goal.
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ADDIE — Instructional Design's Operating System
Analyse, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate — with Evaluate wired into every other phase. ADDIE looks like common sense until you notice how many trainings skip straight to Develop.
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The 70:20:10 Learning Model
Only 10% of learning comes from the classroom. The workshop's real job is to ignite the other 90% — the learning that happens through other people and through the work itself.
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The Forgetting Curve
Within one hour, more than half of what you learned is gone. Within a month, four-fifths. Retention is not about how well content was presented — it is about how often it gets retrieved.
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Lean Learning — 20% Content, 80% Practice
Only about 12% of employees apply what corporate training teaches them. Lean learning is the response: minimum effective content, immediate application, immediate feedback, repeat.
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Understanding Your Participants
Before you design a single slide, know who is in the room: why they're there, what they already know, what they expect — and the special considerations that decide whether they can learn at all.
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Learning Styles — Activists, Reflectors, Theorists, Pragmatists
Two axes — how people take experience in, and what they do with it — give four learning styles. I took the assessment: Pragmatist 19, Theorist 17, Reflector 15, Activist 11. It explains a lot.
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Carl Rogers — Training Is Closing a Gap
"Training is performance driven. There is a real self, and an ideal self — and the trainer's job is to close the gap." The afternoon opened with Carl Rogers and ended up redefining what a trainer is for.
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The Laws of Learning — Readiness, Effect, Exercise, Intensity, Primacy
"I also got law. My law is law of learning." Five behaviourist laws every trainer runs on — and why your school timetable put languages and maths in the morning.
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Andragogy — Malcolm Knowles and the Adult Learner
Pedagogy is the art and science of children's learning; andragogy is adult learning — and trainers who only know one cannot do the other. Five assumptions, four principles, and why adults walk out of bad training.
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Trainer Types — Listener, Interpreter, Director, Coach
To be a good trainer, you need to be a good learner. Four trainer types — each one trains one learning style best, and each one quietly neglects the others.
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The Competent Trainer — Nine Roles in One Person
A trainer is more than a speaker: designer, educator, communicator, motivator and influencer in one. Nine roles, and an honest self-audit of where I stand on each.
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TNA — "Tak Boleh Main Rasa-Rasa"
Why did you send Faiz for training? "Because I feel he needs it." Tak boleh main rasa-rasa — feelings are not a training needs analysis. The second competency of the course begins: CT02, Conduct Training Needs Analysis.
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TNA at Three Levels — Organisation, Task, Individual
The gap might be in the person — but it might be in the process, or in the organisation itself. Three levels of analysis, and a different toolbox for each: SWOT and PESTLE, fishbone and root cause, DACUM and CUDBAS.
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Conducting TNA — Steps, Priorities and the Question Nobody Asks
"A rose by any other name smells the same" — the 7-step model is ADDIE in a new suit. But the working steps are real: link training to business outcomes, measure the gap, prioritise — and ask what happens if there is NO training.
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Say hello
Taking the same course, or thinking about it? I'd be glad to compare notes —daveckw@gmail.com.