In my organisation they tend to call one to one training at the desk using desk notes coaching. However, my coaching skills around using the GROW model etc tend to be very different to this. Is there an accepted academic name for this one to one training of new staff? any qualifications available in how to do it? I ask because my organisation want them accreditted externally but i am concerned that coaching or mentoring qualifications are the wrong route. Help pease
craig mitchell
One Response
Depends which bit’s important
Hi Craig,
I don’t think there’s a simple answer.
You’ve identified something that’s done in your organisation one-to-one, in the work environment, with a clear learning/performance agenda held by the ‘helper’ (if I can adopt that as a general term).
It’s inherent in the GROW model that the learning/performance agenda is held by the ‘learner’. That’s why it’s different.
Lots of people call anything one-to-one coaching. I tend to think the number of people involved is fairly irrelevant, though coaching and mentoring tend to be used to refer to one-to-one interventions, while facilitation sounds more like a group activity. Training and teaching/tutoring could be either.
Writers on coaching & mentoring tend to emphasise the ownership of the learning/performance agenda as the differentiating feature between the two. But it’s by no means a universal consensus. David Clutterbuck, for example, describes this more as a variable within the mentoring relationship, where coaching is a short-term skills-specific intervention that a mentor might provide.
What you describe sounds like on the job training to me (ie how exactly do you do this activity/task), distinct from teaching, which I would say has a wider more liberal aim. So it sounds like the CIPD might be a good place to look for qualifications.