Step one: identify your training needs

Hopefully, our library of training courses has already got you thinking about how working habits at your organisation could be enhanced.

You can also reflect upon results from recent employee engagement surveys, organisational or industry challenges, corporate risks you’ve identified, or recurring themes in performance review cycles or exit interviews.

Step two: draft a potential programme

Now you can think about which of our courses and coaching sessions can help you reach your goals. And we’ve got good news: you don’t need to do all this by yourself! We’ve designed and delivered all kinds of programmes for organisations big and small – maybe even some just like yours – so we’re always happy to advise and share some successful ‘recipes’ that might work as a starting point. Just get in touch for some free advice!

Step three: identify your potential attendees & cohorts

Now it’s time to figure out who the right people to attend the training are. Some profiles you might find yourself considering include:

• Junior staff: this could take the form of a new graduate programme, for example, providing crucial professional skills for people early in their careers

• Managers: an obvious fit for our management training sessions! And remember, attendees needn’t always need to be junior managers – many experienced managers have never received any formal support and find the frameworks and techniques in our courses hugely insightful.

• Rising stars & new challenges: your programme might be focused on developing high-potential team members ahead of future opportunities, while also demonstrating your investment in their career growth. It might also involve training certain teams in new skills, if you anticipate their future workload shifting due to organisational change.

• Need-based profiles: you might match training sessions with particular staff members based on identified areas for improvement, from an appraisal or 360 review process. Here, you’re not simply expecting people to magically ‘get better’, but providing a genuinely valuable opportunity for growth tailored to them.

• Senior leaders: this can be an important group for L&D projects where culture change may be required, or workplace behaviour needs to be modelled ‘from the top’. For instance, we often deliver diversity & inclusion sessions for senior teams.

It’s also worth thinking about how you’ll get people to attend training:

• Voluntary: you simply make the training available, publicise it internally, and people elect to come. In this case, you’ll still want to make clear the importance of the training, and secure a firm commitment for attendance, to avoid no-shows when work is busy (because work is always busy!)

• Selected: here, you’ll identify particular teams or individuals, and ask them to participate specifically. In this case, it’s always helpful to emphasise the positive reasons you’ve chosen them to develop their skills even further, and the potential your organisation sees in them, to avoid the sense they are being ‘sent on training’ (even though we promise they’ll love it when they attend!)

• Mandatory: sometimes you just need to be sure everyone is on the same page. In this case expecting everyone organisation-wide (or within a certain office or department) to attend a session is a way to emphasise how important the messages therein are. But remember, ‘everyone’ should mean ‘everyone’, not ‘only people who are too junior to say they’re busy.’

• Distributed: for some training needs, it makes sense to train everyone in a particular team or with a particular job title - for example, training all your salespeople in presentation skills. For others topics, it might be more appropriate to spread the knowledge around more widely. If you have a number of regional offices, for instance, you might seek to train one person at each location in Mental Health First Aid.

• Manager-led: in this scenario, you make a certain number of training sessions available based on overall need, while managers are accountable for identifying the team members that might stand to benefit from each session the most. As above, this could be based on areas for improvement, high-potential individuals, or simply volunteers representing their team and then reporting back with what they’ve learned.

One thing to bear in mind: because our courses are so interactive (just one of the things what makes them so engaging!) the absolute maximum number of attendees is 15 people. So if you identify a group of 20 managers to take part in a leadership development programme, you will want to split them into two groups (or ‘cohorts’) of ten.

Step four: putting it all together

Now, we’ll work with you to deploy your dream programme: the right topics for the right people, at a time and place that suits you. Remember, we can also deliver all our training courses online for remote and hybrid organisations!

Some organisations ask us to deliver training courses in quick succession, although we don’t recommend inviting guests to attend more than two in one day.

Other clients choose to space things out further – for instance, creating a year-long ‘leadership academy.’ This format gives attendees more time to reflect upon each session and implement their learnings before tackling the next one.

You’ll also meet virtually with the expert trainer scheduled to deliver your course, to brief them on the challenges at your organisation. This helps us meaningfully connect our course material with the facts of your workplace.

Step five: the results!

Throughout the programme, we’ll brief you on your attendees’ progress, the feedback we’ve received, and any additional needs or concerns that attendees have expressed.

With the training in the capable hands of our team, you can take the time to add additional elements to your programme, such as scheduling discussion sessions, supporting staff in making changes to working practices based on their insights, designing additional development material such as reading lists, and promoting internal knowledge-sharing at your organisation.