How a Marathon Became a Team Event
You’ll have seen in the news that Kenyan, Eliud Kipchoge, achieved a remarkable thing – he ran the distance of a marathon in under two hours, shaving nearly two minutes off his own marathon world record of 2 hours, 1 minute and 39 seconds. To put this achievement into context, it meant running an average […]
The second secret of accelerated learning: facilitate don’t train
Last time we looked at business focused and learner centred objectives, the most important of the five secrets. It’s the most important because without it, there is no focus, engagement or follow up. This time, we’ll look at the second of the five secrets, ‘facilitate don’t train’. At the time of first publishing these five […]
Common sense in Business Management
After more years than I care to remember, firstly in management myself with rising degrees of seniority, through to today running my own training and development organisation, it never ceases to amaze me that what I consider simple common sense just does not occur to many people. Is it just me? Have I clouded my […]
Personal development: stop procrastinating and start doing
We are all prone to procrastination in various forms but I believe that the way we live and work now has only made this tendency stronger and easier. What is procrastinating anyway? It’s actually a kind of weird self-regulating failure and although most of us are aware that we procrastinate, we can’t seem to stop […]
The new languages of virtual working
From discussing progress and having annual reviews to booking holiday and asking questions about a task, face-to-face conversations have always taken preference. With the rise of the gig economy, however, and businesses looking to reduce costs, more and more people are working remotely, making these conversations arduous. How, then, can business managers effectively communicate with […]
The first secret of accelerated learning – finding the balance in priorities
In 2013, I developed my ‘five secrets of accelerated learning’. These ‘secrets’ as I call them, were the culmination of research into a fascinating area. This area had many contributors but, up until then, there was no one unifying model to cover everything we had learned about how to accelerate learning through an organisation. This […]
Campaign learning: what is it and why does it tackle eLearning challenges?
In the second part of her series on campaign learning, Issy Nancarrow outlines why marketing tools and techniques can be useful for learning providers and how to use them. A learning campaign is the process of using marketing alongside the delivery of learning or change interventions. The campaign delivers value by increasing awareness, engagement, communication, participation, […]
Introducing campaign learning: what’s wrong with our current approach?
In the first part of her series on campaign learning, Issy Nancarrow looks at the failures of existing approaches to learning and what we can learn from the world of marketing when it comes to transforming the field. Whether the audience comprises corporate execs or students engaged in education, the barriers that prevent learners from absorbing content […]
Are we feeding fear?
Several times a week, I take the winding road up onto Dartmoor. Essentially the main link between Tavistock on the other side of the moor and Ashburton on this, it’s a perfectly useful road for much of the route, with lines down the middle and everything. It’s a somewhat different story on our side of […]
How to create participant buzz around your learning
The long-term effectiveness of any training programme relies on the participants’ enthusiasm and personal investment in it – so how can you inspire them to feel this? Delegates on learning programmes often feel like passengers – or even prisoners – rather than participants. If they’ve been pushed to take a training programme by someone else […]
Learning on the spot: how collaboration encourages workflow learning
Do we need to be concerned with measuring the impact of training outcomes if employees are achieving their goals through taking a more collaborative, peer-to-peer approach to learning? Having worked in learning and development for the better part of a decade, I had to learn how to deal with one fact over and over again […]
Learning transfer
Learning transfer: are old-school training courses dead ducks?
As bite-sized, self-directed online learning continues to evolve, should we be saying goodbye to class-room based learning? Or is there still value in adopting formal training, alongside experiential approaches, for enhancing learning transfer? When I joined the world of work, lengthy, often residential, training courses were the ‘gold standard’ for imparting knowledge and new skills. […]
Learning transfer: why L&D cannot beat the system and effect change through training alone
An unhelpful myth that high-performing organisations are simply made up of talented individuals is preventing L&D from better supporting their learners. Sustaining positive change post-training is a tricky feat if organisations aren’t recognised to be systems embedded with deeply ingrained cultural nuances, processes, strategy and hierarchies that may need to be combated at times. Great, I thought, […]
Overcoming the training transfer problem by adopting a performance-centric mindset
Training transfer – the extent to which learning is applied back in the workplace – is the cause of many a sleepless night among L&D teams. But is measuring the transfer of learning the wrong thing to be worrying about when a much greater challenge – of better integrating learning within work – lies before us? Training transfer is big […]
Feedback: the gift that keeps on giving
Many people feel uncomfortable giving feedback, but establishing a strong feedback culture is essential for a healthy work culture and, ultimately, for business success. Feedback – it’s a hot topic across all industries and it’s key for a business to progress and for employees to act effectively and develop. There are many ways to give feedback, using […]
The Lady in the Boat
My partner and I recently spent two amazing weeks on holiday in North Germany and Denmark, where we got married. During our trip we met so many wonderful people, but one in particular had a lasting impact. We’d started our holiday with a short cruise to Hamburg from Southampton. We were lucky enough to be […]
From learning and development to performance and capability: making the shift
Improving business and individual performance isn’t just about training. It’s time for L&D professionals to provide more value and start thinking in terms of performance and capabilities development. Learning and development professionals around the world have become more ambitious and forward thinking in recent years, but many practitioners lack the necessary capabilities to drive growth […]
Transferring learning is obvious – except it’s not
How do we ensure that learners retain and apply the information gained during training sessions? It’s time for trainers to start focusing on embedding knowledge as a core part of the learning process. Even the best programmes in the world are no use if the learnings themselves aren’t applied, so it’s vital that participants understand from […]
Learning analytics: why it’s time to look at the bigger picture
If L&D is going to embrace 2019 as the ‘year of data’, practitioners need to take a step back and look at learning analytics more strategically to reap the results the industry is hoping for. Learning analytics. There’s no doubt that it’s a big talking point in L&D at the moment. In fact, it may […]
