With this year's HRD exhibition and conference nearly upon us, TrainingZONE takes a brief look at some of the attractions on offer next week at Olympia.
7,000 training and development professionals are expected to attend over the three days of the event, which runs between Tuesday 3 and Thursday 5 April this year.
There still appears to be a bottomless marketing budget for e-learning out there, and it comes as no surprise to find that this year's exhibition has a Multimedia Zone. Exhibitors will include SkillSoft, Knowledge=power and Coventry College Training Services, who'll be launching the NEBS Management Certificate on CDROM. A separate area will be devoted to software for HR support as well as training administration, and will be featuring the likes of Skills Boosters and Computers in Personnel.
A number of exhibitors will be showcasing their wares and laying out their latest thinking over the three days - worth checking out if you'd like to see Video Arts' updated version of their appraisal course, hear the Sunley Management Centre discuss the effects of national cultures on training and development or find out about the Human Synergistics Integrated Change Model. The ubiquitous topic of e-learning also crops up in a number of sessions - stop me if you've heard this before, but you'll be able to discuss e-learning versus classroom learning and find out how e-learning actually works in practice - you heard it on TrainingZONE first! You can also hear the CIPD discuss how to become an online tutor.
In the Interactive Arena, TrainingZONE's very own MD Tim Pickles will be holding forth on the thorny issue of 'training professionals, the Internet and the meaning of life' - no mean feat! Tim will be looking at what the Internet has to offer training managers and trainers, and discussing whether the hype measures up to the reality. Tim's talk is taking place on Tuesday 3 April at 13:45pm. At other times during the conference you can hear presentations from Kogan Page, Steps Role Play, Actors in Management and The Mind Gym, who'll be tackling topics to include giving difficult feedback, coping with conflict and managing change.
If you're interested in dipping into any of the seminars on offer in the conference programme, a panel of members from Easyjet, Tesco and the Astron Group will be looking at the role of manager as a developer; Sue Knight, consultant and author of several books on NLP will be discussing the role of NLP in e-business and there'll be a discussion of the findings from the latest CIPD annual training survey. There's an account of how the BT Global Challenge, a round-the-world yacht race, has afffected those taking part, and another interesting one should be the session on the BBC series 'Back to the Floor'. The BBC's HR director and the programme's producer will talking with two senior managers to discover how the programmes have influenced their own communication styles.
TrainingZONE will be covering the news as we uncover it, reporting live from our stand - number 950, please do come along and see us! We'll also be running a live workshop from the show on Tuesday at 13:00pm, so do come and be with us virtually if you can't make it in person. For much more detail about HRD, see
