In house trainers

Shifting Minds Limited Registered office: Twyford House, 51 Twyford Avenue, London, N2 9NR, United Kingdom.

Registered Limited Company 05003036 VAT Registration 832 3704 46

E n q u i r y

020 8374 3985

We have worked with:-

Private Sector

Muller

SABMiller

AllianzGI

WPP

West Coast Partnership

Discovery Communications

Marks and Spencer

Manpower

Hays

Brambles

Siegwek

Hitachi Rail

Kaplan Financial

Aircom International

Airwave

Spire Payments

Devonshire

Salt

BPP

TubeLines

Nexen

Cabot Financial

OPC Consultancy

MI Sport

People & Partners

Energise Consultancy

Salt Recruitment

Devonshire Recruitment

Consult HR

Mutual Bank

UK Retail Banks

Merchant Banks

Insurance companies

Engineering companies

High street retailers

Global Management Consultancies

Public Sector

BBC

HMRC

Post Office

NHS

Citizen’s Advice

Basingstoke Council

Ken and Chelsea Council

Northamptonshire Council

East Sussex council

Hampshire Council

City Council

Health authority

3rd Sector

Marie Curie Cancer Care

Prostate Cancer UK

Royal College of Nursing

City and Guilds

YMCA

ABE

Family Housing

Peabody Trust

World Animal Protection

Honestly, how good are your in-house trainers?

Most organisations use in-house "trainers" to support their operational training needs. The in-house training team is normally made up of the following: – a small number of "professional" training managers/offices, HR staff and a few motivated managers from other functions. The quality of the training sessions delivered by this group is (in our experience) highly variable. There are always a few naturally capable individuals who are able to deliver engaging training presentations, however these tend to lack true interaction. At the other end of the spectrum there are people delivering training that frankly is poorly designed, poorly delivered and therefore greatly limits participants ability to learn. Organisations that exhibit these characteristics tend to look outside for their training and therefore because of budget constraints restrict purchased training and development activity to those areas of greatest need.

At Shifting Minds we have a very different vision. We believe that organisations can grow large and very effective internal training teams. We believe that much of the learning and development activity required by an organisation (to meet its strategic objectives) can be planned, designed and delivered internally. The benefits of this approach are considerable:-

The cost effective creation of highly trained / skilled workforce
The training courses designed and delivered internally highly relevant to the organisations needs
Managers receive personal satisfaction when delivering training and are more likely to stay within the organisation
Training budgets can be focused on bringing in training providers for key skills/knowledge not found internally

To make this happen requires a number of discrete interventions: –

At a strategy level, this idea needs to be articulated as a key business objective. For example – we expect all managers (at a certain grade) to deliver between three - ten days of training per year. Note: in some organisations this can be linked to the achievement of personal bonuses.

At an operational level, functions need to build training and development plans, and within these plans they need to identify all those activities that could be delivered in-house. This kind of thinking starts to mobilise more expansive thinking about the training that team members could receive. In some organisations this expansion is represented by a key target e.g., All employees should receive ten days of training per year.

At a tactical level, organisations need to put in place high quality training skills programmes e.g., “Training design master classes” and “train the trainer” courses. Ideally organisations should develop common templates and approaches to training design and trainer notes. The role of the training managers/officers becomes one of leading expert - they need to bring in and spread the word about advanced techniques such as Accelerated learning, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and metaphoric case studies. This group can also create training evaluation processes, creating a virtuous circle of feedback and improvement. This group of expert trainers also need to advise when it would still be better to bring in / use external providers i.e., Where the training population was small, or where the skill could not be found in-house

Finally, all organisations who follow this path need to improve their training administration by allocating this task to key functional staff.

Creating in-house training teams

We provide the following training programme:-

The above courses can be run in a number of formats and durations. Typically a Training Design Master Class is one day and a Train the trainer programme is two or three days

We also provide first class consultancy - to help you build an effective and comprehensive internal training team

For more information, call us now on 020 8374 3985 or email office@shiftingminds.com