The state of the economy and the job market over the past couple of years has led to employees focusing more on self-preservation as the rounds of redundancies (or compromise agreements) crash around them. This has led to lower levels of teamwork and more silo-based thinking. As the economy (hopefully) starts to come out of the woods, organisations will need to start promoting more team-based and less individualistic behaviour. A key first step is to restore trust in the psychological contract between employee and employer…then possibly a spot of team-building would help?
The L&D profession has long made the distinction between adult learning (andragogy) and child learning (pedagogy). Having spent last week on holiday with my 2 year old daughter, I’m not so sure that this is a useful/ valid distinction to be making.
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An old freelance trainer who I used to work with would frequently say that “there’s no such thing as a new idea in training.” Maybe it was his way of selling his approach i.e. tell great stories, interspersed with a few activities that bear a passing resemblance to those regularly updated training manuals and a striking resemblance to the same activities he’d used for the past decade. However I’d agree with his contention that as a profession, L&D does seem to recycle ideas a lot. There’s also no shortage of ideas in training that are nonsense, masquerading as fact being recycled too!
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Today I have an article on Training Zone about the benefits and drawbacks of SaaS and cloud computing for managers in L&D. Especially if your internal IT department is being overwhelmed by users’s ever increasing expectations of technology, this is a way that you can take more direct control of the technology that makes L&D work
How are professional firms adapting to the use of social networking e.g. LinkedIn, twitter, Facebook? Have you been an early adopter or are you more sceptical? On Thursday 13 May a couple of my friends from Deloitte days are hosting an event in London – Widening the Network. Share your experiences and find out what’s going on. Does social networking have the potential to transform L&D?
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Yesterday I chaired “Compliance & Canapes” an event hosted at REDTRAY’s Haymarket office. This was a round table discussion for managers and directors with an interest in compliance. It included insights from Ian Hancock, Deloitte on how to build a successful compliance culture and Colin Johnson, Grant Thornton on the forthcoming Ant-Bribery Act which will have a wide-ranging impact.
The consensus from the compliance managers in the room was that the number one thing that they want from their businesses is for their company’s leaders to walk the walk when it comes to compliance. read more…
With the General Election looming, I thought I’d take the liberty of writing about politics. If the political narrative of the 1980s was curbing the union excesses of the 1970s, it looks like the political narrative of the 2010s will be about getting more productivity out of the public sector whose budgets have swollen in the 2000s. One of the ingredients of success will be for managers to manage more effectively. As someone who has trained hundreds of managers, I’d like to think I have good insight into what makes managers successful. read more…
I collared fellow ELN director Barry Sampson of Onlignment to speak at the Trainers & Developers Network last week. I’m very glad he did. Here’s 12 of his top tips on how to facilitate webinars effectively. read more…
I saw that AccountingWeb have republished some tips on time management that I wrote back in 2005. If nostalgia about music goes in 20 year cycles, it seems like the web is going for 5 year cycles…
Anyway, it seems like an entertaining debate about how tidy your desk should be has kicked off on the AccountingWeb website.
Also noone seems to have pointed out yet that the article gave a bonus extra myth…so far 5740 accountants have either failed to count to 6, have decided that the difference between 5 & 6 is not material, have realised they won’t get paid for correcting this, or are beautifully polite.
This blog will be getting a name check or two at the eLearning Network event on Friday 5th March. My challenge is to deliver a session in a Pecha Kucha style – 20 slides only, each set to forward automatically after 20 seconds.
This makes the preparation extra challenging…but think how much the average Board Meeting would be improved if directors had to give their update presentations in this style…6 minutes 40 seconds of well thought through presentation would free up a lot of time for questions and debate.