Each week TrainingZONE will feature a questionnaire completed by one of our members. This week it's the turn of Tim Lane, MD of IT Training and Recruitment Company AbilityCounts and a member of the TrainingZONE users' panel.
Name Tim Lane
Position Managing Director
How did you get to your current role? By starting my own company in April 2002! Previously I was International Sales Director for NCC Education (Jan 99 to Apr 2002); Director of Interskill (Oct 91 to Oct 98); worked in recruitment (and internal sales trainer) with Computer People from Jul 86 to Oct 91 and prior to that I was an IT professional/trainer for seven years.
What are the best and worst aspects of your role?
Worst: Having to do everything! It’s a very small company yet and so lacks the 'buzz' of a large team.
Best: Being able to decide on a particular strategic direction for the business and sticking to it for more than three minutes.
What is your most over-used phrase? Onwards and Upwards!
What is your most hated buzzword? 'Blended' Learning.
What is the best lesson you have learnt? Treat everybody as you would like to be treated yourself.
What has been your best career moment so far? Having started Interskill from scratch, seeing it become one of the top 10 IT training providers in the UK within five years.
What has been your worst training moment? Teaching a group of e-learning sales staff (whose company we had acquired) that from now on they had to be completely different as they were working for me. Then the dataview broke!
What will be the next big thing for training? The final realisation by corporates that investing in (not spending on) training for all their staff, will create a more stable, happy, productive, effective and profitable workforce - this in turn will lead to a massive upsurge in all types of training!
If you would like to complete a member questionnaire or join the users’ panel, email the editor Claire Savage at
mailto:[email protected]
