LearningPoolLive - Sheffield

Last Wednesday I was lucky enough to be one of two keynote speakers at LearningPoolLive Sheffield.  The day kicked off with Steve Wheeler presenting his view on mobile technology and how it is a game changer in the field of Learning and Development.  To prove this fact we participated in a live workshop, the results of which were amazing.  Steve, Andrew Jacobs and myself couldn't stop scribbling. The most fascinating thing for me was how everything we wrote down could be linked together.

Prior to my presentation I was a tad worried I would be on my own with my opinions on the industry, especially how internal training could and should be run.  As is turned out I wasn't.  The topic of  my keynote was Get out of the Classroom!  I outlined the fact that we ditched classroom training over 18 months ago, and with it the cost associated with running rooms, events, and the hours spent writing material that no-one really read.  Instead we replaced it with a more customer focused approach which includes floor-walking in the departments, 1:1 'just in time' desk side coaching when people need it, shadowing computers focusing in what the individual was trying to do,  online content, Fact-sheets, task based clips, videos, messaging - basically anything other than chalk and talk.  Too many trainers sit behind their desks and take orders without questioning what people really want and why. 

We now offer moment of need performance support in the form bite-sized-chunks of learning, all of which are focused on what the individual needs to do to accomplish a task.  

Oh, and I forgot to mention that instead of 7 trainers and 2 admin staff I now only have 3!  Where are the others?  All promoted into other roles.  It's great having trainers who are now customer advice team leaders, business analysts and benefits realisation officers - and guess what, they still use all their training skills but with their own teams.

This week it's Cardiff, let's see how that goes.