Ignore managers at your peril! Your L&D strategy won’t work without them
Managers are a crucial link between the business and employees but how many organisations focus in on them when designing or deploying learning strategies? In this article Stephanie Morgan of Bray Leino Learning looks at how L&D can leverage the relationship with managers to develop more impactful interventions. If you're interested in getting to grips […]
Training duration: what’s the golden ratio?
I've read quite a lot around the subject of attention spans, and the lengths of time given can range from anything from 5 hours to 15 minutes! Have you found a certain amount of time before learners lose focus, and how do you deal with this – do you break sessions into manageable chunks, change […]
Growing business? Grow your people
As a leader, what are you doing to grow your people? No, we’re not talking here about sticking them out in a field and hoping that with the right soil and the right water they will suddenly become more proactive, more innovative or more engaged. Having said that, with the Glastonbury festival on at the time […]
Measuring the impact of training
Develop-meant Training Consultants has worked with The Rickter Company for a number of years. Manager Adrian Pitt talks about his relationship with the organisation and The Rickter Scale® assessment and appraisal tool. My association with “the brilliant blue board” goes back well over a decade. I’m never far from The Rickter Scale®! There’s a demonstration board in […]
Sales Planning Exercises
I am new to sales training and i am looking for training exercises for advanced sales planning, any help would be appreciated. Nicola I am new to sales training and i am looking for training exercises for advanced sales planning, any help would be appreciated.Nicola
Office designs to boost employee engagement
The look and feel of a workplace has a significant impact on an individual’s day and a company as a whole. While designs can (and indeed should) vary from office to office, some features are beneficial to any workplace. Lilli Hender, from workplace experts Office Genie, discusses the key office design elements every business should consider […]
Engaging Participants in Your Training Sessions = Better Mastery
Training sessions can be wonderfully effective, a total flop, or anything in between. The goal, of course, is that participants master the skills and/or concepts being presented, but for this to happen, presenters have to be mindful of their delivery. One of the biggest mistakes that presenters make is that they teach in the way […]
How to get the best value from apprenticeships
Employers increasingly view apprenticeships as a rich source of future talent; securing the right candidate gives an organisation young learners who they can nurture into keen and loyal staff, eager to learn new skills from day one. In fact, the value of an apprentice’s lifetime contribution to a company has been placed at £105,000 by researchers at […]
‘Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right’ – a review of ‘Clarity’ by Jamie Smart
“If a pond is clouded with mud, there’s nothing you can do to make the water clear. But when you allow the mud to settle, it will clear on its own, because clarity is the water’s natural state … Clarity is your mind’s natural state” The introduction to 'Clarity' by Jamie Smart tells me that it ‘is […]
Training and Development strategy for a member association
Hi all, I have taken over a new role in a trade association that represents its members in the automotive industry. Membership of our association is subscription based and as part of that membership this gives access to industry specific training, such as technical knowledge and compliance. Members themselves are small to medium businesses but […]
Sales Training – Looking for a provider to deliver Sales Training & Closing the Deal
I work for a multi-national recycling and asset management company. The business has identified that the sales team need further development specifically in closing a sale. They currently struggle in their ability to clearly articulate the business value proposition, the differentiators, in defending price points and in up-selling other services. I am looking for a provider to design and […]
Five minutes with Mike Leavy, Learning Technology Lead, Virgin Media
Mike Leavy is the Learning Technology Lead for Virgin Media. In this brief interview he talks about what type of employee he wants in the L&D function and how his team help the business identify capability gaps. Mike will be speaking at the CIPD L&D Show in London on May 11th and 12th. Jamie Lawrence, […]
Coffee Briefing: Offboarding, virtual reality & managing distractions
We're back after a long weekend, and so if you're feeling as groggy as we are, reading through a few interesting articles over a cup of coffee is exactly what you need. Here are some of the blogs, features and opinion pieces we've enjoyed in the past week – let us know what you think, […]
How Is Stress Affecting You?
It’s now the leading cause of workplace sickness and affects one in five of us. When will organisations realise that they or their people can no longer afford to ignore stress? In 2014/2015, stress accounted for 35% of all work related ill-health cases with 9.9million working days lost and with less than three out of five […]
Coffee Briefing: Open plan learning, webcams and the truth behind gamification
Another week has flown by, and we've been devouring as many blogs, articles, newsletters and assorted tidbits to make sure we can bring you some of the more interesting and useful posts out there. Here is this week's pick of L&D news, opinion and research – let us know what you think in the comments […]
There’s a link between assessments and performance
In a report on the use of assessments, the Aberdeen Consulting group in the US have found that there are correlations between organisations that perform well (in terms of performance and retention of staff) and who use assessments, and this includes 360 feedback, in a consistent way. One of the key drivers for using assessment […]
Why crowdsourced, peer-to-peer feedback could be the killer tool for L&D
The concept of feedback as a development tool for individuals and organisations isn’t new. But there’s no doubt that one of the clearest messages from experts is the growing importance of making feedback a core organisational value: to enhance learning, engage employees, inform managers and make better organisational decisions. Jo Ayoubi, CEO of Track Surveys, […]
It’s my 25th Anniversary!
Well, well, well… It dawned on me today that I've been in the "training zone" (see what I did there?!) for 25 years. Training children, young people and adult clients – and the staff who work with them – for a quarter of a century! What is it that keeps you "hooked" about learning and development? […]
Why talent development has to be embedded into strategic objectives
Talent is an important differentiator for any company, but particularly for any organisation that values its reputation for customer service excellence. If achieving happy, satisfied customers is a goal, talent development has to be embedded into a company’s strategic objectives. It has to underline everything you do because training is about creating a mind set […]
Have degrees had their day?
Once upon a time a degree used to be a rite of passage into a great job for University graduates, but with accountancy firm Ernst and Young, and now publishers Penguin Random House dropping the degree requirement, it's time to ask if degrees have finally had their day. This could be the best news ever for […]
