Apparently we are consuming more natural resources than the planet can possibly sustain. But is it really a surprise?  Today, Friday 5th June is World Environment Day, a day aimed at raising awareness about the decline of natural resources and encouraging us to do something about it.        

As a training management software house I’m always keen on any valid research undertaken with training businesses which identify what triggers the need to streamline business processes. Software Advice, a software selection and review website, talked to 385 companies searching for a learning management system LMS. The research is really interesting although there were no real surprises, particularly on how many companies still rely on standalone spreadsheets! Here are some of the key findings:-

"How do I know if my courses are really successful?" The question that is on all Training Manager’s lips. It is all about gaining good quality feedback and using it! This blog looks at tried and tested ways of gathering and utilising quality feedback as well as exploring the key differences between the traditional happy sheet and online surveys. 

How do you currently promote your courses?  Are they on your website?  Do you target previous delegates? Are you advertising?  I guess you probably do all of this and more, but do you blog?  If you do or if you are considering blogging around your course content, check out our 10 quick wins.

I recently stumbled upon an interesting piece of research from the online analysis firm Software Advice regarding help desk software. They quote a Gartner report which suggests that 89% of businesses plan to compete solely on customer service in 2015!So why do I find this interesting? I guess there are two main reasons: 1. From a training business perspective - using software to improve customer experience and gain a competitive advantage. And, 2. From a software supplier perspective - how important is it to offer the right level of customer support?

How many training companies currently engage in content marketing as part of their marketing strategy? This is information I don’t have, but my guess is probably more than I think, but fewer than could or should be!  The information I do have is taken from the third annual Content Marketing in the UK 2015: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends and produced from UK for-profit marketers.    

It’s that time of year again, time to review the previous six months: what went well and what can be done better for the next half?  For anyone working in education, this time of year may signify the time to wind down.  However, it also provides a great opportunity for reflection before the summer ends and the chaos of the new academic year begins.

TMS, LMS, CMS, CRM, ERP, SaaS, all these acronyms abound in modern software systems, but what do they all mean? There is much confusion surrounding software today and even more confusion as to identifying the right software solution for your business. Here is a general overview of some of the different types of software on the market and which one may be most suitable for your needs.

"Learning is great, but if you don’t do anything differently afterwards, you won’t get different results" - Alexis Kingsbury (Quote from the webinar on 25th June 2015 on the ‘3 Steps to Improve Training Attendance’ - watch the recording here: http://www.makinggreatness.com/recording-of-webinar-3-steps-to-improve-training-attendance/)

This article originally featured on TrainingZone.co.uk, where it received over 1,000 views. Return on Investment (ROI) is super important for businesses, and individuals too. It makes sense - we care whether the amount of value we receive for an investment of time and/or money is ‘worth it’. Following the recession, many organisations are now busier and more focused on ‘doing’ rather than developing. As a result, lots of recent articles on TrainingZone have commented on the perils L&D face when challenged on the ROI they provide to the business, and how we can measure this. Including: Practice makes perfect sense for training ROI (John Edmonds) Measuring the ROI of corporate training (John O’Brien) The ROI of eLearning (Asha Pandy) These are excellent articles and all worth a read. However, in this article I want to highlight a single issue that has the potential to destroy more ROI for L&D than anything else. The issue is that of ‘utilisation of development resources’. Or more simply, ‘level of attendance on training’. This is essentially how much your development resources (including training courses, elearning, development programmes, coaches etc.) are used, vs. what is made available. Training attendance can quickly destroy L&D’s ROI as… Training attendance has a significant, measurable impact on ROI Whatever return your learning resources are expected to provide (for the cost of providing them), it can be drastically decreased if resources are not used by employees. Let’s say you expect a sales training program to help attendees to increase their sales over the course of the year (by up to £30k gross profit on average, per salesperson). You might expect 10 people to go through the program, and you’ll pay ~£50k for designing and delivering the program, and expect the cost per person who shows up is ~£1k each (time cost etc.). As a result, you’d expect a handsome ROI of 500% (£30k x 10 (attendees) / £60k). However, if only half the expected attendees show up, this reduces to 272%. And if only two people attend, you are practically breaking even. For other courses (such as time management), the ROI may be even tighter to start with! Poor attendance is very visible to managers and employees Some metrics in your organisation have low visibility - such as % of people planning to leave in the next year, or the total amount employees learn. However, poor training attendance is easy to see. Emails announcing a ‘course has been cancelled due to lack of interest’, half-empty rooms, and employees moaning that they don’t receive sufficient development, all paint a picture of an L&D department that is not delivering sufficient value. Attendance tends to go from bad to worse With this greater visibility comes another problem - when people see training isn’t being well attended, they will assume (rightly or wrongly) that the training being provided isn’t worth attending. Trainers will be frustrated or depressed by the lack of interest, feeling the effort they put in isn’t being valued… And so course quality drops too. As a result, attendance (and the role of L&D) spirals downward, until business teams start sourcing their own development resources and barely engage the L&D team at all. Conclusion So if ROI is a key concern for your L&D team, review the extent to which employees use your resources (including, but not limited to training attendance) and see if it’s undermining your efforts. Be aware that improving this area has the opposite impact - good attendance tends to spiral upward when courses are in demand, and so too the ROI (and importance) of L&D. You can learn how to improve training attendance by watching a recording of a webinar (co-hosted by Jon Kennard and me, Alexis Kingsbury), called the ‘3 Steps to Improve Training Attendance’. It covered practical steps, tips and examples to help you improve attendance on your programs. Click here to find out more.

In a previous post, I raised 6 big questions about Millennials for HR & L&D professionals and promised that I’ll be sharing answers to these based on conversations with HR and L&D, research, and my experience. In this post I’m going to share the experience of one of my clients, Prometric (with the kind permission of Leslie Allen, Manager of Professional Development at Prometric). Issue:  Staff retention was becoming a concern, particularly amongst their most talented Millennials (22-32 year olds). The cause of this was identified as lack of career development and profession opportunities due to a flat organisational structure and managers who weren’t planning on moving on. Talented Millennials were keen to progress within the organization but didn’t feel like their talents were recognised or that they were getting the opportunities for growth within their current role. If this had continued, this would be bad for business, as Prometric risked losing the most talented people; reducing business performance and making succession planning more difficult and external-reliant. Solution:  One solution Prometric implemented was the ‘Aspiring Leaders at Prometric’ group. Talented people who are keen to become Prometric’s future leaders are nominated to join the group. Nominations are reviewed (and approved if successful) by senior management. Being accepted into the group is significant, as not only does it acknowledge that the employee is recognised as being groomed for leadership, but also gives the employee access to some special events and development resources. These include: Attendance at panel discussions led by senior leaders Lunch & learns where attendees listen to a TED talk and then discuss their conclusions Courses and communities designed specifically for them e.g. ‘Improving Business writing’ The group is now 70-strong, and will be a huge asset for Prometric in future. This is a great initiative. Note particularly how it presses many of the right ‘buttons’ for Millennials (public recognition, learning and development, teams & communities). It also highlights that ‘top 100 potential talent’ lists are probably not best used as secret succession planning lists maintained by HR, and are instead made transparent (and more powerful as a result). I’ll be sharing more about what Prometric and other organizations do at a free webinar that I’m co-hosting with HR social media and engagement guru, Jo Dodds called ‘Engaging and Developing Millennial Talent’. Click here to find out more and register to attend. What do you think? Would an ‘Aspiring Leaders’ group work at your organization? What else do you do to solve the same problem? (Please comment below)

"If you’re a Baby Boomer or member of Gen X, take a moment to compare how different Millennials’ education was compared to yours […] while Boomers and Gen Xers needed to attend live classes, visit the library for research, and read all the required materials in order to succeed, huge number of Millennials have found more efficient ways of learning. Between Wikipedia, Kahn Academy, recorded lectures, mobile study apps and Google searching through books (why read and browse for data or quotes?), Millennials have learned that they will succeed by doing things their way. Thus, they’re deeply drawn to work that promises self-direction, work-life balance, fulfillment and other benefits and perks that come across as entitled to older generations." - Anthony Lye

Do you measure training attendance? There are lots of ways to do it. For example, you might measure development resource take-up/attendance as: % of people that attended vs. places you want to fill % of people that attended vs. number that registered # of people that attended courses this month vs. target / previous month % of employees who completed some form of learning this month # of hours of learning delivered per employee this year (Or a variety of other ways) Whatever measure(s) you choose, it is important as there is a ‘return on investment’ (ROI) measure at the heart of it - i.e what do we get from learning for the cost of providing it? Now before I go on, I must give a nod to John Edmonds who told us to measure outcomes of learning (business performance improvement, personal achievements etc) rather than input (learning hours). So before measuring training attendance, you first need measure the extent to which you provide awesome learning to employees (so that you can show that the more learning they consume, the better the organisation performs). However, whatever way you measure the outcomes, we can fairly safely assume that if we provide some learning resource (e.g. a training course) and only 50% of the spaces on the course were filled, we are delivering much lower the ROI than if we had filled the course. I.e. Fewer people learning, for same cost of delivery = lower ROI. So, make sure you measure attendance to help you  identify any areas that are suffering (and therefore undermining your ROI). For guidance on how to improve training attendance, watch this recording of my recent webinar: ‘3 Steps to Improve Training Attendance’.  How do you measure attendance? What results are you getting? Please let me know using the comments below.

"The most successful people in life are the ones who ask questions. They’re always learning. They’re always growing. They’re always pushing." - Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad

Filling training courses is important, and failing to do so will result in the decline of L&D. So, here’s three common mistakes to avoid when attempting to get employees to register on your courses. 1. Focusing too much on what the course covers, rather than the benefit attendees receive Often it’s tempting to explain to employees exactly what a course will cover. The topics, the exercises, the duration of each session etc. However, spending time on this means you won’t focus on the benefits the employees will achieve by attending. Employees choose to register for training courses based on the results that expect to get. If they don’t know, understand or believe the results that your training courses will deliver, they are unlikely to register and even less likely to attend. Read more about ‘How to sell the end benefit of your training courses’.   2. Failing to provide any evidence of the quality of the course Hopefully your employees believe that you are generally good at your job and put together high quality training courses. However, training courses take up time that the employee can be using to deliver their personal and business objectives. As a result, you need to help employees conclude that time spent on a course will be worth it. One way to do this is to use social proof (e.g. testimonials from people who have benefitted from attending the course, or from subject matter experts that have reviewed the course materials). Another way is to include subject matter experts and senior leaders in the delivery of the course, for example running a training course on Excel run (in part) by Management Information experts. One L&D professional I spoke to recently told me that by applying this one technique to some of her courses, registrations increased from 2-4 attendees per course to 15 attendees (full!). 3. Making courses ‘too available’ L&D professionals like being helpful. They want to support employees to learn at times that suit them, fitting it around their work. They want to provide useful courses to as many employees as possible. However, doing all of this has an undesirable consequence… courses are ‘too available’. If an employee fails to register for this month’s communication skills training course, they can probably register for the course next month, or get one of the cancellation slots, or register at the last minute because its probably not full. As a result, there is very little incentive for employees to register for courses in advance. This makes it hard for L&D as lists of courses show small numbers of registrations, and L&D don’t know whether they’ll get a sudden influx at the last minute or whether they should cancel the course. So instead, L&D need to create some urgency. Make it more important or desirable for an employee to register early (e.g. first 5 registrations on the sales training course get a 1-2-1 with Head of Sales), and find ways to encourage employees to get the benefits of learning sooner rather than later. You should also help employees see courses as more scarce, e.g. by ‘selling out’ of courses (so registration is necessary), or by only scheduling repeats of courses only after the earlier ones have filled up (rather than offering a communications course every month).   So in summary: Shift focus from what the course covers, to the benefit attendees will receive Don’t forget to provide evidence of the quality of the course, and the likelihood that attendees will get the desired results Avoid making courses too ‘available’, instead create urgency and scarcity   Do you want to be the L&D leader that takes your organization from average to exceptional? Click here to learn about our L&D Accelerator™.

"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter." - Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

In a previous post I introduced the 3-Step model that you can use to improve training attendance. In this post I’m going to delve into one very specific part of the model that helps us to "create DESIRE": ‘Using social proof’. Why you need to "create DESIRE" for your courses Employees choose to attend training courses based on the results that expect to get. If they don’t know, understand or believe the results that your training courses will deliver, they are unlikely to register and even less likely to attend. So, if you are going to improve attendance on your training courses, you’ll need to create desire in your employees. One way to do this is to ‘use social proof’. Why you should use social proof In a previous post, I covered why (and how) to sell the end benefit of your courses to increase training attendance. I explained why you need to make a bold claim about the results your attendees will get as a result of applying what they’ll learn. This is powerful all on its own, but to really maximise the impact, we need to back up what we’ve said with evidence from others i.e. social proof. For example, compare the following: "Attend the sales skills course to learn the skills needed to double your sales in 6 months" "Attend the sales skills course to learn the skills that enabled John Smith (ABC Dept) to double their sales in just 6 months" Although #1 is strong, it is clear that #2 is even stronger. There is a lot of psychological research that shows that when deciding what to believe and to think and do, we tend to look at what others do. You may have heard of the Asch conformity experiments that were run by Solomon Asch in the 1950s: A participant joins a room with a group of others (seemingly participants in a study but they happen to be actors in cahoots with the experimenter). They’re all asked to identify which of three lines they are shown is the same length as another reference line. The whole group correctly identifies the line that matches the reference line. In half the groups, this leads to a successful matching rate of >99%. However, in the other half of the groups, after a few correct answers, the confederates / actors start incorrectly identifying the matching line. Does the real participant go against the group, when it’s clear everyone else is wrong? No. Many agreed with the group, reducing their success rate to 63.2%. That’s a demonstration of quite how powerful it can be when other people around us are saying or doing something or behaving in a particular way. The power of social proof cannot be overestimated. How to use social proof If you’re not making it obvious that other people are registering and attending a training course then people will assume the opposite; that actually people aren’t attending or that it’s not beneficial to attend. This isn’t about tricking people into believing something that’s not true, it’s about making visible things that are going on. For example, making it visible that of the 12 spots you’ve got available in the training course that 6 have already gone within the first few days. Or even better, making it visible that people have got the desired results from attending the course. Making the invisible, visible There’s a number of ways you can use social proof to do this. Using quotes and testimonials is one of the easiest and best ways. For example: "I attended Alexis’s webinar on how to improve training attendance. It highlighted strategies I could use immediately to get bums on seats." Celia, L&D Manager You can also use statistics, such as: After attending the webinar on how to improve training attendance, attendees were asked how likely they’d be to recommend the recording to others (on a scale of 1 to 10). 80% of attendees gave the session a 9 or 10 out of 10. Or even just numbers: There are just 12 spaces remaining on my course to improve training attendance. You can use these in the emails and promotional materials that you use; highlighting the number of people that have already registered or even better, highlight specific people and why they’ve registered. For example: "Dan registered for this course because ‘ I really want to improve my sales skills when presenting to clients, to help increase my conversion rate at the last hurdle.’" What we can ‘prove’ When we think of social proof, there’s a 3-level hierarchy I developed to help you consider the options you have for what you will ‘prove’. The power of the influence of what you are proving at each of the levels increases as we move up the hierarchy. Level 1: Expected quality of input This is the bottom level of the hierarchy. We are only backing up the suggestion that the course will be worthwhile based on what went into developing it, or based on other people planning to attend. For example: "I’m looking forward to attending the course because the presenter is an expert in sales improvement." Or having an expert who’s going to be delivering the course highlighting their credentials so that the people being asked to attend believe that the quality of what they’re going to learn is high. Level 2: Perceived usefulness of the content (after people have attended it) Once people have been on the course (or during!), get them to provide feedback about what they thought about it. For example: "I found it really useful and I completely expect to double my dales as a result." So this is generally based on feedback from people who have actually got experience of the content - and although they haven’t got results yet, they believe they will. Level 3: Direct results At the top of the pyramid, we provide proof of people who have attended the training and got real results. For example, someone saying: "I’ve doubled my sales between March and June by applying the principles I learned." It doesn’t only have to be quotes though, statistics work too. For example: 75% of L&D managers on the L&D Accelerator™ say they would ‘strongly agree’ that their performance appraisal scores have improved as a result of being a member. You can see the power that this social proof has will increase as you move up this hierarchy - but so is the difficulty of getting it. If you don’t have those results, because you’ve only been running the course a week, then you’ll need to use level two. If you’ve never run the course before then you’ll need to use level one. Putting social proof into action Hopefully you now realise: You should think about the different types of social proof that you can use and how powerful each is. Regardless of whether the course is run yet or not, you should be able to use social proof in some form. You need to plan how you’ll collect feedback for use as social proof in advance! Remember, there are no excuses for not using social proof. Even if this is the first time you’ve run the course, use level one - emphasize why you and others think that the quality of the input is so high. If you work in L&D and want to learn about how to lead your organization from ‘average’ to ‘exceptional’, consider applying to join the L&D Accelerator™. Amongst a whole load of other resources and perks, it contains content that 100% of L&D managers rate 8+ out of 10. (See? Social proof!).

"I’ve never met anyone whose interest in learning something exceeds their ability to do so. Whereas I’ve met lots of people who feel they do not have the ability to learn something, but really lack sufficient interest." - Alexis Kingsbury @makinggreat

In a previous post I introduced the 3-Step model that you can use to improve training attendance. In this post I’m going to delve into one very specific part of the model that helps us to "create DESIRE": ‘Creating urgency’. Why you need to "create DESIRE" for your courses Employees choose to attend training courses based on the results that expect to get. If they don’t know, understand or believe the results that your training courses will deliver, they are unlikely to register and even less likely to attend. So, if you are going to improve attendance on your training courses, you’ll need to create desire in your employees. One way to do this is to ‘create urgency’. Why you should create urgency This is something that tends to be done really badly within organizations and done really well outside of organizations - because within organizations we want to be really nice! We want to say to people: "We get that you’re busy but there’s a course that would be helpful for you… But don’t worry, we’ll run them whenever you want throughout the year. We’ll make everything available to you and there’s absolutely no urgency at all." That’s being really nice but it’s not true. There isn’t an infinite budget. You do have to plan these things in advance. How to create urgency If you’re providing a course that’s going to help people hit their sales targets, why should they wait? Why should we say it’s fine if they attended in three months’ time? Emphasize why they should attend the course NOW Instead, L&D should be saying: "Come on! If you’re not hitting your sales targets you should be on this course. It’s in two weeks’ time and you should make time for it because the end benefit is hitting your sales targets. We’ve run this course before and other people have hit their sales targets as a result. Therefore, if you want to do that you need to sign up now." You should communicate this to managers too, so they can help you create this urgency with their employees. Highlight where there is limited availability When we say urgency, it’s not just creating urgency about attending the course on a particular day, but actually creating urgency around registering as well. So, let people know how many slots are remaining on a course. Highlight that spaces are limited, that they’ll go quickly and encourage people to register as soon as they can. Provide bonuses for early registration In the external world of training, (companies who provide training to other companies or individuals), they are able to do things like discounts or bonus products for people that respond earlier and sign up earlier. You might think this isn’t possible internally, but you can! For example, if we use the course I mentioned before about hitting your sales target, you might say: "For the first 10 people that register, we’ll arrange 1-2-1 time with the top sales person, to discuss what you learned after the course and how to put it into practice to achieve great results." Now of course in theory, the employee themselves could contact the individual and arrange it… but there’s something very valuable about having it done for them, so it works as an incentive to register early. The key is to identify something of value to the employee that you can provide to them (often for free, and very little effort). Then you can create urgency by creating scarcity (limiting how many you will provide). For example: "Register 7 days from now if you want XYZ" or "Be one of the first 10 people to register and you’ll get XYZ." You’ll find that when you create that urgency, you’ll massively increase your registrations. Creating ‘DESIRE’ generates impressive results When urgency is combined with ‘selling the end benefit’, and ‘using social proof’, you’ll find that employees greatly desire your courses and other development resources - valuing them highly. As a result, they’ll be keen to register and attend ASAP. One of my clients, an L&D manager at a professional services firm, found that registrations on training courses increased ten-fold! She then applied the same principles to e-Learning and other development resources and received similar results. So, please try these approaches out in your organization and let me know the impact it has had in the comments below. If you work in L&D and want to learn more about improving training attendance and other topics that help you to lead your organization from ‘average’ to ‘exceptional’, consider applying to join the L&D Accelerator™. Please be quick though - we’re nurturing a small community of like-minded professionals that want to get amazing results, so spaces are very limited to allow for enough 1-2-1 focus. If you wait, you may not be able to join. (See? Creating urgency!)  

In this post I’m going to highlight 3 big ways in which Millennials differ from previous generations, and why this matters to organizations like yours. I’ll explore this in more detail in a webinar I’m co-hosting on the 20th August (16:00 BST). 1. The Internet Millennials are the first generation to grow up with the internet. They had access to the internet at school, and probably in their home too. To them, pretty much anything they need to know is google-able, but with so much information available, they increasingly rely on social networks to identify what really matters. Their education and entertainment is intertwined through consuming videos on YouTube, reading blogs, and attending virtual events. When socializing, there are no boundaries of geography or time - they can nurture relationships with over a hundred ‘pen pals’ all over the world in one afternoon. Why this matters to your organization: Your top Millennial talent will expect unlimited internet access so that they can be the best they can be. They expect to be able to use video sites and social media to research and find the answers they need. They expect to be able to use (and install) their preferred tools, and be trusted to achieve the objectives they are set. They don’t want to hear poor reasons why their job is made more difficult through site blockers or usage policies. They don’t want to be expected to work in a bubble or even within the confines of a small team. They don’t want to fulfil the role of ‘IT support’ to their managers, when they feel they do the job better or faster themselves. They don’t want to be forced to consume learning materials that are lower quality or less entertaining that other freely available resources on the internet. 2. ‘Well rounded’ development Millennials have been educated by their parents more than any previous generation. Not particularly in academic subjects (although that may be true too), but in the areas of ’emotional intelligence’ and ‘soft skills’. They have been encouraged to attend (and then transported to and from) pre & post school clubs that cater to a wide variety of interests. Whether they were interested in Acting, Chess, Cricket, Guitar, or learning Japanese, there was a club they could join. They became part of multiple communities and learned how to relate to other people effectively. They’ve been told by schools and careers advisors to ensure they are ‘well rounded’ and that university applications with ‘straight As’ are not enough - they must demonstrate their other competencies via extra curricular activities such as charity work, team sports, and the ‘Duke of Edinburgh award’ (in the UK). Why this matters to your organization: Millennials understand that skills & capabilities are more important that knowledge. As a result, they expect management and L&D support to help them identify the areas they need to focus on, address these areas, collect feedback on the impact and repeat the process. They expect that lines between being ‘at work’, ‘working from home’, and ‘learning’ are blurred and expect fair, flexible and supportive approaches to how they will learn and work best. They also expect to be part of groups of interest and to contribute meaningfully, rather than be considered a member of the audience. 3. Personal technology (including mobiles) Millennials are also the first generation to grow up with their own devices (laptops, tablets etc), and mobile phones becoming common for most children. They are used to being available to anyone at any time, regardless of where they are. They have increased the number of devices they own and carry to cover a wide range of functions including note-taking, emailing, video calls, photography, navigation, translation, education, and entertainment. Why this matters to your organization: Millennials expect to be able to do most of what they can do on a work computer on mobile devices and their home computers (and vice versa). They expect to be able to continue learning and working outside the office, accessing content on the their mobile devices and at home. There are lots of others ways in which the period Millennials grew up impacts their expectations and capabilities in the world of work. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

This post is based on one I originally wrote for HRZone.com Millennials are no longer the new kids on the block. They started entering work 19 years ago, and are now the largest generation in today’s workforce. Before long, they’ll not just be the largest generation of those in work… they’ll be the largest generation of managers, then leaders, then CXOs. Unfortunately, some organisations are finding it difficult to attract, nurture and retain the best of these Millennials. Over time, this will mean that they lose their top talent and are left with whoever remains. Undoubtedly this will put them at a competitive disadvantage. So, here are three common ways organizations are turning off their best Millennials and practically pushing them out the door (and how to avoid them): 1. Putting limits on technology and tools As I explored in this article on 3 ways Millennials differ to other generations, Millennials are the first generation to grow up with the internet. As a result, your top Millennial talent will expect technology in your organization to be an enabler, not a blocker, so that they can be the best they can be. Blocking video and social networking sites is a particularly naive move because a) Talented Millennials use these resources for real work and b) Lazy Millennials will just use their phones instead. 2. Making them feel like they’re treading water Many articles suggest that Millennials are more ambitious than other generations. Regardless of whether this is really accurate for the generation as a whole, one thing is for sure: your A-player Millennials are rightly ambitious. If you communicate to them that success in their role means a promotion, they’ll aim for that. When you tell them there isn’t a manager role available yet, or that they have to wait until the next round of promotions, they’ll feel like they aren’t progressing. Your top dogs will soon find their way out of a small yard. Instead, provide them with a career development path based on experiences and skills so that there are no barriers or boundaries to what they can achieve. I explore this further in my ‘5 Nutrients for Growing A-players’ - look out for a post on this soon. 3. Leaving them to ‘get on with it’ You might imagine that your A-players will appreciate being given space to complete tasks their own way, be a self-starter, and manage their own development. Giving them some space is important (they won’t want to be micro managed), however, too much space feels like neglect. Your Millennial A-players will want to feel like they are contributing, doing a good job, and that their own development is being supported. As a manager, speak to A-players first (rather than your ‘problem-employees’) to ensure they are getting the recognition, feedback and support they need. Once done, they’ll be motivated to go and achieve great things, leaving you to sort out those people that have issues. As an HR or L&D professional, ensure you are providing coaching/mentoring to your top talent, with opportunities for regular feedback from colleagues. What do you think? What other factors are big turn-offs for top talent?

Now that the sales are over, let’s consider how retail therapy is made possible. There are four, excellent retail Toolboxes: Retailer 2 Retail Operations Retail Supervision Retail Management 1. Retailer 2 (12.06) Retailer 2 covers the core units of the Certificate II in Retail, as well as five selling, merchandising and marketing electives. Rather than […]

eWorks’ TrainingVC customers are not limited to the VET sector alone. As businesses become aware of the functionality of this integrated learning management platform, our clients are coming from increasingly diverse sectors and departments. And this is why: #5. To prove compliance with quality reporting Organisations are accountable for their training both internally and externally. […]

The On Your Guard Toolbox supports the CPP20211 Certificate II in Security Operations from the Property Services Training Package. The Certificate II in Security Operations qualification is the entry level that meets the national licensing requirements in the guarding industry, and this Toolbox covers 21 units of the Certificate II course. Learners working through the […]