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Three major roles of trainers as mentioned by Lippit and Nadler (1967) are learning specialist, an administrator and a consultant. A more detailed identification of the trainers’ function have been developed by White (1979) who listed nine of them which are analyzing needs and evaluating results, designing and developing training programs, delivering training, advising and counseling, managing training, managing organizational relationships, research, development of professional skills and expertise and development basic skills.

Later in 1980s the American Society for training and development indicated that there were 15 distinct roles of trainers ranging from evaluator up to the transfer agent. There is a central role that has to be accomplished by the trainers. This is where Lawrence Munson (19840 emphasized that “every training function should have an overall mission statement with standard of performance to articulate and delineate clearly the kind of quality of overall result to be achieved’.

The roles of trainer later developed into four major areas of management, training/communication skills, design and production materials and selection of evaluation techniques. Each of these four major areas has its own breakdown of details and focuses.

The core content areas can become the basis of an academic base in training. After several reviews by experts, there is a final 31 list of competencies for the training and development field as proposed by Mclagan & Bedrick (1981), ranging from the adult learning understanding to personnel/human resources understanding.

Training is all about teaching and coaching human being, the most subjective target group and requires trainers to be able to handle different roles and functions while dealing with them. The issue arises when some appointed trainers don’t really know what their role is. Therefore it merely important for HRD practitioner to clearly know exactly what their functions and roles are in order to become effective trainers.

As the time passes by, the roles and functions of trainers had been developed and expanded accordingly, from small part of content delivery to major and bigger roles of consultancies. This means that trainers, especially those who are the sole person responsible for training in their organization, spend at least half their time performing more global “support” functions than actually training people. The global roles are things that are not easy to identify or define. This means that in this modern era the function of trainers is not only focusing on the subject matter or the content of the training modules but is expected beyond those capabilities.

There are other significant roles and functions of trainers that need to be shared here which are program planner, program designer, module writer, program manager, program administrator, media specialist, teacher, facilitator, counselor, coach, mentor, first aid practitioner, researcher, change agent, marketing manager, liaison officer and evaluator.

The ability of any particular trainers to understand the roles and functions mentioned previously will help them function effectively as well as helping their organization achieving its human resources development objectives. And personally due to ever changing social environment and education level increase, I believe the roles and functions of trainers will be expanded and bigger responsibilities are needed.

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