Creating teaching materials that are more engaging is at last being recognised by the majority of teaching staff as the right thing to do and to most of us its equally essential to make the resulting courses accessible to students and learners inside and out of a classroom on demand and available on the learners […]

From guest writer John Dalziel. Just over 2 years ago, in one of my podcasts, I asked this question… "What has a Mallard got in common with, using New and Emerging Technologies?" At that time, before I retired, feedback from workshops, face-2-face and online sessions told me that most delegates had engaged with the amazing […]

But it took a lot longer than that for so many learning providers to become ‘less than good’. Over the past seven (ok ten) days a minority of organisations in the FE & Skills sector and in particular colleges, have through publications and articles come under severe criticism for the decline in performance of leadership […]

With most firms facing fierce competition in global markets, frequent organisational change - both large and small - is the norm. And yet by some estimates, two out of three change initiatives don’t achieve their intended goals. In an attempt to improve the chances of success, organisations are increasingly told to focus on the "soft" side of change: leadership style, corporate culture and employee motivation.

As organisations cast a wider net for opportunities in turbulent, global markets, managing the unexpected has become the new norm. Despite adopting more sophisticated technologies, data sets, tools and processes to cope, firms are more dependent than ever on hiring and developing key talents to innovate, build resilience, and navigate the unknown.

Why do some organisations repeatedly bring brilliant innovations to fruition, while others flounder and fail? On the surface, these innovation leaders seem infallible - but the truth is that even they fail sometimes too. However, they understand one thing more clearly than firms that repeatedly miss the mark: what matters more than great ideas is what you do with them.

As senior executives grapple with the size, pace and complexity of modern organisations, it’s their job to stay abreast of all the important matters and developments going on around them. To make the best decisions, executives need to be masters at acquiring, organising, and applying useful knowledge - whilst filtering out the noise.

Like products and services, management innovations have their own lifecycle: they’re new and exciting at first, but their decline is inevitable. In their prime, they may be perfectly relevant - but this can’t last as situations and environments change over time.

I love winning! It doesn’t matter what I’m playing: Words with Friends, Bejeweled, Candy Crush, or Trivia Crack. I accept invitations to games from friends and "community matches" - I’m not selective. I don’t even have to be competing against another person. I just love winning! And I’m not the only one. Millions of people engage in all forms of competition daily: sports, video games, computer games, cribbage - and the list goes on. It’s in our nature. So it makes sense to use competition in the classroom to generate engagement.

Let’s say you’ve just finished updating a New Hire curriculum and need to roll out the training content to your trainers in the field. Although the training is not completely new, there are several updates to the content, and your trainers need to be comfortable with the updates before they go into the classroom. How do you present these updates to your trainers? What’s the best way to present a "train-the-trainer" (TTT) session in this scenario? Do you even need a TTT session?