Epic show report

Learning Solutions, London

Business Design Centre, May 2004
Report by James England, Business Development Manager, Epic

The Learning Solutions 2004 show took place on 25 – 26 May 2004 at the Business Design Centre in Islington. It is billed as “Europe’s leading event for business learning innovation” and is sponsored by AON Consulting.

The show combines a conference programme of seminars with a selection of exhibitors. Disappointingly, there were not as many exhibitors as advertised in attendance, with the majority offering LMS systems and training programmes but an interesting selection of seminars based around three topics – implementing learning; management development and promoting training – proved to be worthwhile.

Selected presentations
Harnessing the power of informal learning in your organisation
Creating time for learning in your organisation

Harnessing the power of informal learning in your organisation

Speaker: Gunnar Bruckner, CEO Coaching Platform Inc.

Gunnar previously worked within the training division at the United Nations, before becoming the CEO of coaching platform and clearly felt that informal learning was not given the attention it deserved within organisations.

Gunnar posed the question – What is informal learning? and made it clear to the entire audience that this was something that occurred to all of us each and every day. We all need to learn to support and improve our work activities and Gunnar clearly believes that the best way to do this is to empower employees to learn rather than to enforce a formal learning approach on staff, yet organisations typically spend 80% of their training budget on formal training.

The suggested approach to empower these learners is for organisations to facilitate learning through the creation of a learning culture. This culture encourages discussions around the water cooler and the scheduling of time at work to learn whilst not prescribing what should be learnt – the employee will know what skills and knowledge they need to gain.

Effective learning can take place when it is not controlled by an organisation, and through informal learning knowledge and skills can be developed enhancing organisational performance.

Creating time for learning in your organisation

Nina Merchant, Learning and Development Manager, Mott MacDonald
Keith Whitburn, Project Manager, National Patient Safety Agency

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This seminar presented two speakers, who presented a very different approach to finding time for learning within organisations, one involving a top-down approach to gaining buy-in to training, the other using e-learning to deliver anytime, anywhere training to a wide target audience in the NHS.

Mott MacDonald is a global engineering management consultancy and their approach has been to bring learning to the learner, rather than taking them away from work to gain knowledge.

There are key business drivers for training but difficulties in getting a commitment for training to take place – in an organisation where 80% of staff are revenue generating, training days can appear costly. The needs remains though, so how to gain the commitment?

In Mott MacDonald, Learning Champions were used, with the first Learning Champion being used at Board level. This was felt to be key – buy-in from the very top of the organisation. Other tools were used to enable learning – online learning, shorter lunch-time sessions, access to experts to deliver instant and credible solutions – all designed to ensure that time away from clients and projects was minimised.

The National Patient Safety Agency had a similar problem - how to ensure buy-in from a diverse range of management and staff, whilst helping those staff members requiring the training to find the time to complete it. In total that is 1.3 million users with individual needs, requiring up-to-date content.

The solution from the NPSA was to develop 7 online modules as part of the NPSA Resource Centre allowing anytime, anywhere access. These were also designed in such a way that generic and role-specific content is delivered to each user, with 75 variations in total.

Buy-in came through previewing the materials with a 23 minute video, emphasising the relationship between the content available in the Resource Centre and patient safety.

Users learning through these materials, are learning on the job – saving vast amounts of money in staff cover costs, as well as trainer expenses. As the materials allow personalisation, each user can see the benefit of learning that is relevant to their tasks.

Both these seminars demonstrate that whatever the approach to delivering learning in an organisation, where there is the desire for it to succeed – from management and employees – tangible benefits will result.

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