The role of an adult educator

An adult educator is someone who trains and assesses adult learners. It’s a specialised skillset and in many cases, training others forms the professional development loop for a person alongside coaching, mentoring, assessing competency and evaluating competency along a skill pathway.

As an adult educator your role can be to:

• Train and coach other people, both on and off the job
• Supervise and verify others to complete documentation towards their assessment
•  Assess the competency of a learner
• Design assessment resources to validate competency decisions
• Moderate assessment design and decisions for industry.

If you are considering developing your skill set of training and assessing competency in New Zealand’s workforce, there are some things to consider:

Your responsibility as an assessor

Adult learners need to be ready to sit an assessment and to give it their all. As an assessor, it’s your role to make clear, fair and valid assessment decisions. Your skills are vital to the trainee’s experience and their future learning pathway.

Training adults

Helping generations of people to perform better at their jobs while enriching every aspect of their life is truly rewarding. Having the tools and knowledge to help people to understand core components of their job while performing them safely is a skill worth developing. You’ll need to learn how to apply adult learning theories in real-life scenarios through your own unique, effective teaching style.

Designing good assessment and training resources

This is a specialist skill set, which is often in high demand in the New Zealand educational industry. Designing assessment is a rewarding job, where you close the loop on good training and assessment practice. Good assessment design leads to good assessment decisions. 

Moderating assessment

Ensuring that robust quality practices take place to support competency decisions is another specialist skill that well-trained assessors exhibit. Assessors with these skills are able to moderate across New Zealand in specialist subject areas. 

Ready to take the next step?

As you can see, being an assessor is a highly rewarding career choice. If you’re ready to take the next step, visit our Adult Education courses to find out more about the courses we offer.