Advanced Facilitation Skills Certificate

Today’s talent development professionals are often expected to do more than just lead learning events. They may be called upon to facilitate stakeholder engagement sessions, guide strategic discussions, deliver presentations, or support organizational change initiatives. Advanced facilitation skills are valuable across a wide range of business settings. Learning those core skills can make you a go-to resource in your organization and raise your profile across business lines and in executive leadership teams.

At the end of this facilitation course, you will be able to: 

• Adopt a facilitation mindset. 

• Assist groups in defining their purpose. 

• Create safe spaces for group collaboration that foster trust and openness. 

• Facilitate groups through a process to solve problems. 

• Pivot facilitation to respond to unexpected events. 

• Advance your talent development career with in-demand facilitation skills recognized across the industry. 

• Facilitate effective meetings and group sessions skillfully to enable problem solving and foster engagement using a successful meeting process.

• Refine your presence and personal facilitation style to lead with greater clarity, authenticity, and confidence.

• Navigate unexpected group dynamics with agility, awareness, and emotional intelligence.

• Deepen your expertise through highly practical, experiential learning and personalized feedback that sharpens both mindset and facilitation techniques.

• Gain access to ATD-exclusive templates and tools to use in your own practice.

• Earn an industry-recognized certificate, continuing education credits, and an ATD digital badge to share with your networks.

This program is intended for experienced facilitators, trainers, and professionals from any industry who want to deepen their facilitation effectiveness, increase their expertise, and tackle more intricate group challenges. Additionally, leadership development practitioners, instructional designers, learning consultants, training managers, and subject matter experts (SMEs) who facilitate learning, lead meetings, guide the meeting process, or conduct strategic planning sessions will find this course valuable.

The Advanced Facilitation Skills Certificate is designed for experienced trainers and facilitators who are looking to expand their reach beyond learning events. The program focuses purely on facilitation and is appropriate for anyone who facilitates meetings, strategic project discussions, change management initiatives, or other situations where they are responsible for supporting groups of people to solve problems.

The Training Delivery and Facilitation Certificate covers the end-to-end training cycle, helping participants develop and practice facilitation skills in an in-person learning event to drive learning outcomes. In addition, ATD offers a training and facilitation course focused on the virtual classroom. The Virtual Training Delivery and Facilitation Certificate focuses on the training cycle and shows facilitators how to build engagement and meet learning objectives in a virtual setting using proven approaches and tools.

The ATD Master Trainer program is a comprehensive assessment-based program that covers all aspects of training delivery and facilitation in learning and development. The course includes content on the training cycle, adult learning principles, instructional design models, needs assessment, and aligning training to business outcomes. The program emphasizes facilitation skills to create learning opportunities. Participants earn a designation upon completion.

The Advanced Facilitation Skills Certificate is narrowly focused on facilitation to support groups solving problems in various settings, from learning events and workshop facilitation to meeting facilitation, presentations, and group discussions. The program is appropriate for trainers, as well as people outside traditional talent development, such as presenters, managers, leaders, and subject matter experts. Participants earn a certificate upon completion.

The program offers practice sessions throughout and concludes with a final practice facilitation, during which participants receive feedback from an ATD facilitator and peers. 

Contact ATD’s Enterprise Solutions team for information about bringing this advanced facilitation course to your organization, either in person or virtually. An ATD representative can assist with scheduling, advise on which facilitation course aligns with your requirements, present facilitator options relevant to your industry and goals, and discuss possibilities for customizing the content to your team’s needs.

Additional information to help you prepare for your advanced facilitation course: 

• Completion requirements: Review the attendance policy before your course begins to ensure your successful completion. 

• Technical requirements: Ensure your tech is ready for the first day of your training course. 

• Enrolled in a program? To check your course status and enrollment details, launch your course, or download your certificate, go to MyATD. 

• Terms and privacy: Review our cancellation policy, health protocols for in-person courses, and more. 

• Have additional questions about ATD courses? Visit our ATD Education FAQ for answers.

• Openings and Brave Space Creation  

• Define Your Learning Environment

• Values Exploration and Integration 

• Bias Recognition

Purpose Definition and Problem Framing

• The EQ Hot Seat  

• Safety Experience Analysis  

• Group Communication Systems: Disagreement Navigation

• The Tale of Two Facilitators

• How Do You Show Up?

• Group Ownership Techniques  

• Integrating Silence

• Energy and Focus Management 

• The Challenging Participant

• Your “Special Sauce” 

• Facilitating Your Session