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This skill will help you start on time and finish on time! Meetings, training sessions, or anything that takes forever to complete is a sign of poor preparation and bad facilitating skills. A good trainer will have checked and re-checked how much time he or she will need to complete each section of the presentation and have a satisfactory completion.
When you look at time management, you have to look at the whole picture, especially if you are working in a team. You need to take into consideration the time that your team member will take to get his/her task completed. You need to check for a convenient break period and lunch etc.

The best approach, obviously, is to develop your agenda that will have a starting time and a finish time.
You are going to break into three groups and develop your agenda with a starting time of (arbitrarily) (9:00 AM and a finish time of 10:00 AM) your job is to fill in the middle and you must include a break. Don't forget to utilize your preparation/planning skills while you are doing this task.

Another important skill for a youth trainer is the facilitating skill. We have all been in situations where you have been called to take the leadership of something, it could be anything as simple as taking a child to the park or as complicated as organizing and conducting a workshop with a group of your peers.

Being a facilitator is different from being a presenter. A presenter will usually get in front of a group and deliver a topic. He/she may or may not utilize facilitating skills.

A facilitator's role is to make sure that the group stays on task and that everyone is given an opportunity to participate. Sometimes a facilitator may be viewed as an enforcer/gatekeeper. But, you can choose to be a good enforcer or a mean enforcer. Here is where your communication and observation skills come to play. Be cognizant (aware) of people's feelings and of the agenda. You will have to learn when it is a good time to interrupt and how to interrupt. A participant may want to dominate a discussion. What or how can you interrupt that person without telling him/her to "shut-up"?
You could say, " While your point is interesting, let's see if there are other points of interest"; or simply walking over to the domineering participant and with a simple touch of your hand on his/her shoulder with "that's a good point _______" but we need to move on to the next topic.

A facilitator's job is also to set the norms for group participation. These are the group rules that everyone will agree to follow. You can do this on your flip chart prior to the group meeting. A good start is to introduce yourself and explain your role. I am here to make sure that we finish on time, therefore, to assure that this will happen we need to state the governing rules. Some norms (rules) may look like the following:

Norms
Respect for each individual.
Do not interrupt while another is talking.
Wait your turn.
No putdowns.
No racial slurs.
Finish on time.
Ask for clarification.

Evaluation: This is critical so that you can improve your delivery and get some important feedback concerning your message. There are a number of ways that you can accomplish this:

• A paper evaluation asking simple yes/no questions
• A self reflection concerning the topic, the daily event or the activity

The Developmental assets are 40 opportunities, skills, relationships, values, and self-perception that all young people need to succeed. Copy Right 1999 by Search Institute, 700 South Third Street, Suite 210, Minneapolis, MN 55415; 800-888-7828; www.search-institute.org. This handout may be reproduced for educational, noncommercial uses only (with this copyright line). All rights reserved.