sheridan@keystonedevelopment.co.uk
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Conscious Competence – It’s bloomin’ hard work!!

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I’ve just got back from a long weekend in Centre Parcs – my kids’ favourite place in the world. As part of our mini break, we went quad biking. To be honest, it’s one of those activities that’s actually very easy to pick up – but difficult to do well. I was probably the worst in the group, and despite the very good instruction by Josh, I was still the worst at the end – but I had improved. But boy, was it exhausting!!! Not just the physical side of it, but the continuous concentration, the identifying the nature of the next obstacle, thinking through how to tackle it, and then doing it, and working out how adjust if my approach wasn’t quite right. My husband (and ex motocyclist) said that I should just relax and feel my way around – but that’s OK for him – he had lots of (similar) experience to fall back on. I did not. Everything was a conscious process for me. Thinking everything through worked, but it was hard work. It made me realise how much we are asking of people at the end of a training event. I always stress that training is…

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Self-Serve Learning: Magic Bullet or Cop Out?

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Over the weekend, I was listening to a podcast about simplifying learning. The feeling was that we (as learning professionals) should be encouraging people to source their own learning, but making it easy for them to do that. Why do we put people on a full day Excel course when they just need to learn how to do two functions? Of course, encouraging ‘just-in-time’ learning and making it easy to access is a brilliant thing for us to be doing: Agility in the workplace is increasingly important, and enabling people to learn what they need to learn, when they need to learn it is a no-brainer. BUT… What when we don’t know what we don’t know? That’s when a formal workshop or course can be massively helpful. People may enrol on a workshop or on-line course because there’s something specific they want to learn. However, this might only form 20% of the content. OK, maybe 20% of the rest of the content is irrelevant, and maybe they already know another 30%. That means 30% of the session is extra ‘bonus’ learning. Things they didn’t realise they needed to know, or is just helpful in other ways. Case in point: A…

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The Great British Train Off

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I was asked a question by a freelance trainer in my network who had been running events for a client – “Should I hand over my training materials?” The client then asked to have all of the training materials so they could mop up and run events in the future. My contact was reluctant. The client felt it was their right. It’s a tricky one unless (like me) you always intend to share materials and factor the cost of design into your work: If my clients pay me for the time it takes to design the materials, they can have them. If they don’t, they can’t. It’s quite straight forward, and I’ve written before on this topic. Ultimately, it depends on the agreement between client and supplier and there’s certainly no right or wrong approach. But, as the Great British Bake Off started again this week, I couldn’t help but compare the two situations: You could provide me with all the equipment, the ingredients and detailed instructions to make some of those show-stopper cakes, and they would be a disaster (though I’d like to think I’d make a reasonable success of some of the challenges!). Skill and experience make the…

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Bring WHY to life to unlock performance

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Last week, I was involved with the #LostCastles project – where giant carboard castles were built across the region and on display for one weekend only. There are LOADS of learning points I could share from this experience around planning, teamwork and communication but instead, I’m going to focus on the importance of vision, and why HOW we communicate that matters. Early in the week, the volunteers were in a large room in the Town Hall making boxes – the ‘bricks’. It was fun for about 30 minutes, but after an hour it was dull. Then we (me and my kids) were asked to tape bricks together – that was surprising hard work and after another hour, we were bored again. We could see other people making more complex shapes and we wanted a part of it, but these people already knew what to do and they didn’t really need any more. We’d been shown the diagrams of how the castle would look, and a very interesting video showing the construction of a castle elsewhere. This was great, and we tried to keep it in mind, but the fact is, we were just making bricks. Yes – there is a…

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How to Design Training

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I’m very active on LinkedIn and I realised that many people I’d started my career with are now in very senior positions, or have international roles doing very exciting things. I am still doing (more or less) what I was doing 20 years ago: designing training workshops, learning materials and live learning events. I wondered if this meant I was a failure. I am also aware that many small consultancies like mine and putting more content on line – creating videos, running webinars, and so on. My infrastructure is so bad, I can’t do any of those things. We struggle to watch iplayer. Sometimes I feel that I’m being left behind. But focusing on what I HAVEN’T done, and what I CAN’T do isn’t going to bring success, so I flipped these thoughts. I chose not to climb the corporate ladder for 2 reasons: 1) because I wanted my children to be brought up by their parents, not a childminder, as 2) because the further into management you go, the less involved in training you are. I am a creative person at heart, and my skills aren’t in managing schedules and budgets. By staying as a researcher, designer and occasional…

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Material Things…

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There has been a move away from detailed training materials over the last few years, and I totally get it. Whether it’s saving the environment, catering to different learning preferences, curating what’s already out there, or just wanting people to note down their personal learning rather than the theory, in many ways, limiting training materials makes sense. I have cut down the amount of delegate training materials I create, but actually not by that much. Many people still like to have all the relevant information in one place. That said, increasingly delegate workbooks are presented digitally rather than physically. The slides I create are largely visual so giving delegates a copy of the slides is pointless if it is supposed to act as reference material. Anyway, last week, I was grateful for my slightly old fashioned habit of creating detailed delegate workbooks. I was running a workshop and was told (15 minutes before we started) that some of the delegates would be attending virtually, from another country. English is not their first language. They appeared on the screen where my slides would normally be, so I immediately ditched my slides. Thankfully, I always create detailed trainer’s notes and these, combined…

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FARE Training – Providing Vitamin D for Learning

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When the sun shines and it’s warm outside, I actually WANT to eat salad and fruit. This is good, because I’m carrying a few excess pounds and eating more healthily will help me to get back into shape. It’s harder to make healthy choices when it’s cold, wet and dreary, even though I know I should. The draw of a cheese toastie is just too much! the vitamin D in the sunshine does us more good than we realise. For me, it’s highlighted the importance of a vitamin D equivalent in learning, and the link between environment, feelings, actions and results, and how one affects the others: Your environment affects your feelings, your feelings shape your choices and actions, and your actions define your results. Of course, your results then feed into creating your environment, and around we go again. Most training interventions (understandably) focus on actions: what we do. What we do – our behaviours – have a direct impact on results so it makes total sense. Our behaviours are also the easiest to define, observe and learn, and they are within our circle of control. But we know that impact will be limited if we don’t spend time…

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The Secret Benefit of being a Bespoke Training Designer

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In my last blog, I questioned whether bespoke training was always the right thing to offer. Creating programmes especially for a client, reflecting their culture, structure, language and good practice means that there is always the danger that boundaries aren’t being pushed. BUT, pushing boundaries isn’t always what’s needed. Often, we need to share good practice and help people to achieve high standards (which have been agreed) across the whole organisation, and that’s where bespoke training really adds value. As a bespoke training designer, I need to really get to know the business to do this – recently I’ve been getting to grips with Industrial laundry. It also means working closely with the internal L&D team and taking a steer from them about what should be included. And this is where I benefit personally. If I was a typical training provider, I would have a handful of set courses that I was an expert in, and clients would select the workshops (or programme) that they felt best meets their needs. If I’m selling a set programme, it’s set. I would deliver the same thing over and over, reinforcing my expertise in these areas, yet having no incentive to diversify. Any…

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Is Bespoke Training Best?

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Naturally, my view is ‘YES’! (in most cases). This is why… Recently, my husband attended a leadership course. It was the first he’s ever been on, despite being in a senior role for more than 10 years. Naturally, I grilled him about it! It was a good course – no question about that. The trainer was knowledgeable, engaging and experienced. The concepts covered were interesting, up to date, and provoked thinking and debate. He enjoyed it and found it useful… in the main. But it wasn’t bespoke to his role, or even his industry (though in fairness to the trainer, he acknowledge that everyone worked in the NHS). As someone who ALWAYS creates programmes that are bespoke to a specific organisation, I thought this was the one thing that would have made this workshop better – after all, training is all about application to the job. If we can’t apply what we are learning what’s the point of learning it? I put this to my husband, and he agreed to a point: Tech companies and manufacturing work very differently to the NHS, and although it was interesting, it was sometimes difficult to understand the link and apply the principles to…

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Training Design – More than just a typing job

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I attend a lot of networking events, and often find myself explaining what it is that I actually DO for clients and trainers. Clearly I need to work on my communication skills because people  assume that I’m some sort of programmer, creating sophisticated e-learning packages. I can just about manage social networking platforms, and am one of the least IT literate people I know!. Or, when I describe that I create live training sessions, I’m told “Our administrator does that for us”. I then have to politely explain that “No, they don’t”. What you administrator does is prepare your training materials. This is quite different from designing training. I am not a typist. My typing skills are average. I’m competent in the use of Word and PowerPoint, but I’m no whizz, but that’s not what my service is about. Indeed, I sometimes employ graphic designers and typesetters myself.   I am a degree-level educated person with over 20 years experience of learning and development in commercial environments. People don’t use me (or my associates) to do a typing job for them, they employ me to create a coherent, robust learning and development solution to address a specific business need, that can be…

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