What I learned from my interim editorship at TZ

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October 26, 2011

What I learned from my interim editorship at TZ

I can’t believe six months is up. At the start of May I took over as interim editor of TrainingZone as the incumbent editor Jon Kennard took off for a few months travelling the world.

Fast forward the end of October and here I am saying goodbye to the great team. I have really enjoyed my time on TZ - I deliver training so I always thought this would be a good gig.

And it has been. I have really enjoyed the role and have learned a few things, which I thought I would share.

The people
For me, this role and all that I do professionally is about the people. And so is L&D. So, no surprises that I have met some great people in the last six months, both within the TZ community and in the wider L&D community. A big thanks to all the writers too.

I have been well supported, have felt free to ask questions and I even got invited to share my thoughts on making training fun to an elearning Network event in Bristol. Okay, so I didn’t win the pecha kucha competiton but I was up against the ELN chair Rob Hubbard.

Being interim
This was my first contract after going freelance so this role was about doing what I had been tasked to do. In this instance it was about delivering on a day to day, week to week basis until Jon returned from his travels. I was hired to do a good job and to keep TZ doing good things and providing the community with what it expects. I was not employed to change the world. I think that is important and an important part of interim roles - to meet expectations.

A few new things
That said, I still like to try new things and was given the opportunity to do so: I was delighted to:

Do some audio interviews - using Audioboo on my iphone.
Aggregate content - we pulled together coverage from Learning Live into one article.
Put on TrainingZone’s first Twitter chat with the help of Jane Hart.
Published curated content as a part of our social learning month, again with Jane Hart’s help
I was also delighted to publish this article on freelance rates which was written by Frances Ferguson. Frances surveyed community members and then produced a report on her findings, which she published.

I was also delighted to publish what turned to out to be some popular articles including James Mcluckie’s Top 10 smartphone apps for L&D professionals, Garry Platt’s article on The Forgetting Curve and Seven Suphi’s article on emotional intelligence in leadership.

Overall, it has been a great experience and I have been lucky to do the role. I’d also like to say thanks to former HRZone editor Charlie Duff for helping me get this contract. I don’t see this as being the end - I already have a couple of articles to write for TZ - and who knows what the future holds?

Thanks again for having me and look forward to meeting you again soon. I’m aiming to carry on blogging here as well as on my other blog at itsdevelopmental. Otherwise, it would be good to connect on Twitter or Linkedin.