marc

Hi folks, it has been just over 12 months since my last post. In that time I have had what could be described as a forgettable year in 2015. After a heart attack in February, I took a sabbatical to recover and to be fully focused on my health. Despite the obvious need to do this and the signals my body was giving me to slow down, this was a tremendously difficult thing to do. I felt that I wasn’t making the contributions that I should have been and this had a really negative effect on my mental state.

marc

Feedback on performance is critical in closing the communication loop to a candidate. Too much feedback, too soon can be overwhelming but too little can be demotivating and produce diminished results. So how can we strike a happy balance? This article looks at six things trainers can do to provide better feedback.

1. Find the sweet spot with MIC (Maintain, Improve or Change) when reflecting on participant performance.

marc

Aside from building subject-matter knowledge, timing would be the next biggest challenge for new trainers and trainers of new material. It is often difficult to accurately ascertain how long material will take to cover and equally problematic to identify appropriate timeframes for learner activity. As such, trainers need to work strategies into their planning that will give them some flexibility when delivering and enable them to do more with the time they have.

marc

Learning and Development is a vital part of any organization, large or small. It helps to increase efficiency, generate performance improvement and support workplace competitiveness. As practitioners, we have a profound responsibility in guiding the futures of our participants and setting them up to be capable and confident learners as well as productive workers.

marc

In training, “the appetizer” relates to the opening. This is where the trainer gets to make their first impressions and is also their opportunity to focus the participant to what is coming next, both in terms of content and experience. As such, the appetizer represents a bite-sized taste of what is to follow and is the trainer’s chance to whet the student’s appetite.

So give them a TASTER of what they can expect:

marc

As I sit silently in a self-made lock down to complete my latest book about training games, I thought I would take a break and consider the wider process of becoming published.

More and more, educational institutions are asking for staff to contribute to their professional development through scholarly activities such as conducting research, presenting papers at conferences or having articles accepted for publication. The question we get a lot from our students is “how do we get ourselves published, the first time?”

Here are some hints:

marc

Even experienced trainers with the latest resources and most interesting training material can be thrown off course by the behaviours of difficult participants. Therefore, it is important to load the kit bag with a variety of tools and techniques to overcome the dilemmas presented by some students.

marc
Most participants' brains seem to stop functioning when you invite them to ask questions. It’s like at the mere mention of the phrase “are there any questions” a chain-reaction of nuclear proportions engulfs the participants’ brains and they all become suddenly quiet as the fallout spreads through their bodies and renders them incapable of even making eye contact! Possible causes:
marc
Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown in their book “Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” (Harper Business June, 2010), examine why some leaders (called “Diminishers”) drain capability and intelligence from their teams while others (called “Multipliers”) amplify it to produce better results. This was certainly an interesting read and I just love the concept of creating a genius factory within our organisations where we have multipliers leading groups of multipliers, resulting in exponential growth and development across the entire business.
marc
I have spent the last week in India with our Partner organisation Cotmac and each time I come back I see the rising tide of change and expansion. It is exciting to be involved with such a vibrant culture and to be part of the necessary skills development to support quality education and training.

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