Nelson Croom's Blog

ELearning Award Nomination

by Andrew Turner

We are very proud to announce that we have once again been shortlisted at the E-Learning Awards.

This year we have been shortlisted for two categories: E-Learning Development Company of the Year, in which we received the Silver Award at last years’ ceremony; and Excellence in the production of learning content - not for profit sector category, for our work with One Plus One.

We are proud of being shortlisted in both categories and have our collective fingers crossed for the Awards Ceremony on November 11th.

Training: A Future for Young Workers

by Andrew Turner

In today’s market it is becoming increasingly difficult for young people to get their first job.  From personal experience after my Masters, and that of my friends on the course, more often than not applicants for positions receive no response at all rather than an interview. In fact in a recent survey only “23% of employers had recruited a young person to their first job.”  This is a tiny portion of their workforce and leaves many young people unemployed, and often with a student debt hanging over them.

Employers seem to have the opinion that the lack of job experience prevents young people from being work-ready.  Yet this prejudice is preventing young people from gaining this experience, and more so forcing them to take unpaid work placements in an attempt to break in to industry.  In this instance employers are not only breaking the law; according to Balanced Accounting “Unpaid internships are actually illegal - even if both parties consider the arrangement to be voluntary, national minimum wage rules apply”, but are also exploiting the young workforce by exchanging their work for CV’s which are full of 2 to 4 weeks at various different companies.  Whilst this shows the commitment of the candidate when they apply for a job, if every candidate has this how can it work as a differential?  Plus, how much on the job experience can truly be gained from these roles?  For obvious reasons often no real responsibilities are given and much of the work is menial.  Due to this the experience is far removed from actual work, the pressures of deadlines and the experience of working as an equal member of a team.

Having just started here at Nelson Croom, in my first role since completion of my Masters, I am lucky that I have found a company who were willing to give a young candidate a chance.  Many of my friends are not so lucky and are struggling to find more than placements which cover their travel expenses.  Not only is it discouraging and scary for them but it is a strong contrast to statistics released this week that “84% of employers recruiting new graduates found them to be well prepared.”

With this statistic in mind I can’t help but think that employers should take the chance and offer on the job learning to help develop young professionals.  More and more jobs are demanding some form of CPD and are benefitting from it.  Perhaps if it was accepted across the board as something used to continually cultivate new and existing talent then employers wouldn’t see young people as such a risk.  Rather they would be seen as people who it would be possible to achieve the maximum output from, for a longer period of time.  It is not only young staff who benefit from CPD, but perhaps it can be used to extinguish the uneasiness many seem to associate with employing people to their first position.

Going to Dublin

by Rachel Bruce

I was in Dublin last month to meet with two of our partners, CPA Ireland and Accounting Technicians Ireland.  As I arrived at their beautiful Georgian building, close to St Stephen’s Green, CPA Ireland was providing face-to-face training to a group of Lithuanian auditors.  I was interested to find out how this was going as it is a new initiative for CPA Ireland.  During one of the breaks, I was shown into the bright and airy training room and was introduced to John McCarthy, the presenter, who also happens to be one of our new authors that I hadn’t yet put a face to, who said that the training was going well.

I wondered how the language barrier was being overcome.  CPA Ireland showed me that each delegate has a copy of the PowerPoint slides, each copy with an English version and a Lithuanian version side by side.  In addition to this each delegate has a headset. In a separate room, while John McCarthy was presenting, two interpreters were translating the presentation which each delegate could then pick up via their headsets.  It was really interesting to see this set up, and how well it was working and being received by the delegates. 

The main reason for blogging about this though is that it reaffirmed something I have always believed throughout my working life: that even though new technologies are moving on apace, and facilitate amazing things in terms of building ‘virtual’ relationships, there is still a place for meeting people face to face.  My reason for meeting with CPA Ireland was to talk to them about the development of their online portfolio of courses from our Accounting and Finance portfolio, not to find out about their training of Lithuanian auditors.  However, in the process of meeting with them, on their turf, I found out and saw for myself one of their new initiatives in action.  This has helped to further my understanding about how our partner, CPA Ireland operates, which only serves to strengthen the bond that we have. 

Institute of Physics – record number of registrations

by Rachel Bruce

I recently met with Vishanti Fox at the Institute of Physics who has been creating and coordinating a campaign to market the online courses that we provide for them, to their members.

IOP set themselves a target of generating 400 new registrations for courses throughout the first month of the campaign. As the result of an email campaign to their members, they have had 420 new registrations in June, the most they’ve had in any one month since the launch of their portfolio at the end of 2005.

Vishanti was delighted with the result, and I asked her how she had worded the campaign.  She said that it was very straightforward and to the point:

• The online courses were chosen to meet the needs of the members
• The content was tailored for physicists
• The registration process was easy
• There were 18 new courses available

Keeping it simple clearly works.

Registration numbers are all well and good, but we also need to know that the courses are being well-received.  As part of a new initiative at the beginning of this year, the IOP courses now include a completion area with an evaluation questionnaire.  The evaluation questionnaires confirm that the IOP’s online portfolio of CPD is a success story, with plenty of positive comments and testimonials from the members.

I’m now talking to Vishanti about how we can sustain registration numbers and positive feedback on a monthly basis going forward.  So far, so good.

New Course: Buying a Business

by Rachel Bruce

Peter Howson has written a third technical course for us for our Accounting and Finance Portfolio.  Buying a Business follows in the footsteps of Due Diligence in Mergers and Acquisitions, and Selling a Business.

Buying a Business enables a learner to:

• plan carefully and strategically for their acquisition

• understand what they need to know about the market, the target company, and the deal

• understand the due diligence process, what it’s for and how to conduct it effectively

• create a plan for effective integration of the acquired business

Buying a Business completes Peter Howson’s trilogy on this subject, and like the others, I’m sure will be well received by the finance folk who buy our courses. 

New Course: Promoting Your Professional Practice

by Rachel Bruce

We have launched a new course this week in both our Accounting and Finance Portfolio, and our Professional Development Portfolio.  Promoting your Professional Practice, written by Drayton Bird enables a learner to:

• Assess their current marketing activities, and decide what other types of promotion will work best for their business

• Think about what aspects of their business differentiates them from their competitors

• Target potential clients, and retain their existing clients

• Build and develop a targeted marketing database

• Maximise their return on investment

I’m pretty excited about this new launch as it is a really practical course written by an extremely knowledgeable marketeer who has great tone of voice, a wealth of experience to draw upon, and a straightforward approach to helping people promote their practice, so I’m sure it will prove successful in both of our portfolios.

10 years on: CPD

by Alan Nelson

The emergence of Continuing Professional Development as a serious part of professionals’ lives has been one of the key developments that have shaped the company over the last ten years.

Of course, nothing is completely new. It’s not as though professionals didn’t engage in their own development. Some of the ideas were around back in 2000, but the language was different. I remember a lot of talk of “cradle to grave lifelong learning”. If we were to prosper as a society, we were told, competing in a global market, we would all have to become knowledge workers , using our superior skills to stay ahead of competitors in lower wage developing economies.

So when did CPD start and how? The honest answer is that I don’t know. So I did what every lazy researcher does and turned to Wikipedia. I was amused to note that if you type CPD into the online encyclopedia, it comes up with a host of other expansions of the initials, nineteen of which apparently rank higher than Continuing Professional Development. So however important it may seem to me and to the people I talk to in professional bodies, we should all remember that it ranks nine lower than the Oregon based rock band, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Puts it in perspective doesn’t it? I should also say that the entry is far from comprehensive and includes this comment from the moderators:

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (November 2007)

Now there’s a project a group of us should turn our minds to.

Good professionals have always strived to stay current and this has been explicitly stated by many. The British Psychological Society, for example, had the following principle in their Code of Conduct long before they established their formal CPD regime:

“Psychologists shall endeavour to maintain and develop their professional competence, to recognise and work within its limits, and to identify and ameliorate factors which restrict it.”

Often through a network of local branches, professional bodies have encouraged their members to engage in training and development. Many of our early projects focused on this sort of activity and were designed simply to extend the reach of the professional development services on offer to members.

Over the years CPD has become more clearly defined. The Professional Associations Research Network suggests the following:

“[CPD is defined as] 'any process or activity that provides added value to the capability of the professional through the increase in knowledge, skills and personal qualities necessary for the appropriate execution of professional and technical duties, often termed competence.”

For what it’s worth, I think I prefer there to be more of an emphasis on currency. This definition from The Health Professions Council works for me:

“A range of learning activities through which health professionals maintain and develop throughout their career to ensure that they retain their capacity to practise safely, effectively and legally within their evolving scope of practice.”

Alongside this clearer definition of what is needed, there has been a move towards greater compulsion.

The move towards more tightly controlled and monitored CPD has been driven partly by the professional bodies. In health they are responding to adverse public reaction to high profile medical malpractice cases, and elsewhere the response is to other governance related cases such as Enron, which has been the catalyst for action in the accounting profession. This is reinforced by pressure from government for the professional bodies the get their house in order if they want to retain their regulatory role.

This move to the right of the scale created a demand for CPD resources of all kinds. What was exciting for me personally was that this world looked remarkably similar to others that I knew all about. I cut my teeth as a publisher producing textbooks for students. Students would buy good books in greater numbers than bad books. They found out whether a book was good either through peer recommendation or through a suggestion from their lecturer. But one thing was clear – they were mostly going to buy a book because they knew they needed it to get through their course.

The parallels with CPD were clear. I could see that if we could produce something good it would sell better than something bad. Good would have to be defined. It might mean any or all of: engaging, relevant, authoritative or fun, for example, but it was the existence of a CPD regime requiring professionals to complete and record their CPD that would ensure that they would buy something. It created a market.

It was to meet the demands of this market that we developed our publishing programme. We now offer our courses to a wide variety of professionals and are learning all the time about what they like and what they want. We also understand more about who is most likely to opt for online CPD:

• Judging by our sales, CPD activity is highest in regulated professions where CPD in mandatory and monitored. We have also been pleased to see that alongside the move to more regulated CPD, individuals are starting to migrate rapidly towards online offerings.

• In the UK and Ireland, two thirds of the courses are bought by women, who make up only one third of our audience. More women work part time and find it difficult to fit attendance at face to face events around other commitments.

• There is a bias in take up towards younger, newly qualified accountants, although this is not nearly as pronounced as expected.

• More courses are bought by those in practice, where a future course booking may conflict with a paid client work, whereas completion of CPD online can be fitted around other priorities.

• Finally, take-up is highest where CPD is monitored on an inputs basis – by hours or points – rather than on an outputs basis.

One of the things I like about publishing online is that you can see how people are using the courses. I never knew how someone used a book but I know exactly how they use our online courses. This means we can continually evolve our approach to meet their needs. So although more than 95% of users consistently rate our courses as good or excellent, and 98% say that the course has met their professional development needs, we continue to develop the offering to meet the needs of a CPD world that may well change over the next ten years as much as it has over the last.

Developing Flexible Routes to CPD

by Jacqui Nelson

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the MemNet Membership Development Conference. I had been asked to talk about how membership bodies can provide flexible and accessible routes to CPD for their members. My interest in this area is in the provision of effective and engaging learning.  This was neatly complemented by Lee Davies of the Institute for Learning, who focused on recording and reporting CPD activity. You can read about his institute’s innovative (and successful) use of Personal Learning Spaces on his blog.

Here’s a quick hop, skip and jump through my talk. You can find the slides either here or on the MemNet Vault.

I started by posing the question, what is professional development?

Professional development, to my mind, can be broken into three main areas:

• Initial professional development – This might be a degree or vocational course, but equally, it might take place on the job. I’m a marketer by background and when I began my first job I learned what I needed, initially, from my colleagues. It was a while before I moved on to any formal professional qualification. This leads on nicely to...
• Professional qualification – Most professions will require you at some point to take a professional qualification to prove you are up to the job.
• Continuing professional development (CPD) – So now you’re qualified it is your responsibility to make sure that you continue to keep up to date, and in many cases there are consequences if you don’t.

So who does CPD? We’ve worked with a lot of professional bodies on this and it is abundantly clear that you are more likely to persuade your members to do CPD if it is regulated and mandated -they need to do it in order to maintain their license to practice. Other bodies, not governed by regulation, make CPD a compulsory part of membership and how successful they are tends to depend on their auditing process.

With many bodies now providing learning and development opportunities to their members we moved on to looking at what professional bodies should provide and how should they provide it. We talked about how most membership bodies have very diverse audiences. Members are tied together by a common profession or qualification, but they will vary in age, experience, background etc. From this we can conclude that there is no ‘One size fits all’ solution.

Your membership wants to learn what they want to learn and in a style that suits them.

This makes professional development different to many other types of learning. Think of a child’s experience in school. They arrive in a school year at roughly the same age, having learned the same syllabus for the past year. They embark on learning the syllabus as each other this year. And give or take a bit, they will reach the same standard.

For professionals it is different. Everyone arrives at learning with different knowledge, specialism, experiences, and, most importantly, requirements. At this point, getting them to click on screen 1 of 48 and then move through each screen in a linear fashion misses the point completely, and will turn professional learners off. They need a diffused approach which embraces their differences, builds it into their personal learning path and allows them to learn what they want to, not what you want to teach them.

Professionals need flexibility of delivery as well and online CPD can be an effective way of providing that. So who does CPD online? Research shows;

• Women are more likely to than men
• Young people
• Those in rural locations
• Those in practice (where their time is chargeable)
• And those who operate CPD on an Inputs basis.

The last point is not always what professional associations want to hear as so many organisations are moving to outputs based CPD, but the reality, at the moment, is that members of organisations with inputs based systems are more likely to buy CPD courses than those with outputs.

I then did a quick exercise where I asked the audience to analyse their personal learning style. Pleasingly and unsurprisingly we had a range of different learning styles; Doers, Observers, Thinkers, Experimenters.

I wanted to make the point that people learn in different ways and that is as true online as it is in the classroom.

Elearning that delivers a fact and then asks you to answer a multiple choice question about that fact is NOT good learning.

In terms of Bloom’s taxonomy, you’re not getting past first base. You may, just about, have got the learner to remember, but for learning to be effective you need to move further up the pyramid – understanding, applying analysing, evaluating…etc – and its all possible online.

So how can you achieve this deeper learning online? In our experience a learning objective boils down to one or a combination of three things. It requires a change in attitude (A) or behaviour; the acquisition of a new skill (S); or the gaining of knowledge (K). This is what we call an ASK analysis. To achieve each of these different objectives you need different types of activities and learning.

And finally, good online CPD needs to be some combination of three things; information, learning and communication/collaboration. The last one is key, as people are getting more and more used to communicating online.

I finished the presentation by working through some examples to support the argument and demonstrate what is possible. If you want any more information on these or any other elements of the presentation, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Jacqui.nelson@nelsoncroom.co.uk

Disciples of Sisyphus or 21st Century Professionals?

by Alan Nelson

I read with interest Charles Jennings’ recent article, Less is more: A different approach to L&D in a world awash with information. I had been alerted to this author a while back when Jacqui returned from an e-Learning Network Event enthusing about his presentation.

Jennings central theme then as now is that the way professionals operate is changing. He highlights the remarkable rate of expansion of stuff you might expect a professional to know, citing as evidence the work of Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com, who in May 2009 wrote in the Harvard Business Review,

“In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008.”

Getting professionally trained and then staying up to date is an increasingly Sisyphean challenge. Our expectations are changing though. Whereas it used to be the case that a professional could be expected to know most of what was needed to work in their chosen field, we now realise that in many areas that has become nigh on impossible and so a greater emphasis is being placed on having the information available: knowing where to find the answer, rather than just knowing it.

How much of this is driven by the expansion of knowledge and how much is due to the role technology has played in putting the answers within easy reach, I don’t know, but I am sure that Jennings is right to argue that it has significant implications for professional education, and of course for online learning providers.

This idea appeals to me instinctively – I’ve never much liked the anorak approach to professionalism. Most of the time we don’t need the world’s expert in any case, but we do expect a basic level of competence. And that requires more than just knowledge and information. If you put me in a doctor’s surgery and gave me access to the most extensive and user friendly reference resource imaginable, I’d still be a rubbish doctor. I’d be no better in a local authority benefits office. I agree that I wouldn’t need to know every detail of the benefits system, but I don’t know how it works at all, so I’d be no good at all.

I agree with Jennings that there must surely be a need to move the focus away from teaching facts and towards enabling people to assemble the core skills they need for their professional life. It chimes with our philosophy of putting the learner in charge. Put another way, perhaps we should see our purpose as educating people to understand how something works – the principles - and how to use them to make good judgements.

Jennings suggests some core skills that people will need – search and find skills, critical thinking etc – and these are useful. However his focus is primarily on the role of the L&D function within organisations, whereas ours is more on individual professionals – both their initial professional development and qualification, and their continuing professional development. So how does the change potentially affect the different types of learning resource that we create at Nelson Croom.

We claim four capabilities:

1. Distance Learning
2. General Professional Development
3. Formal CPD
4. Compliance

Let’s look at them in turn.

 

Distance Learning

Our distance learning projects are focused on preparing students to take their professional exams. The students do not get to decide what they would like to learn; they just want to ensure that they have reached the point where they have the requisite knowledge and skills to pass the exam.

This places an emphasis on the Examiner who sets the syllabus. They are in an invidious position. If they keep the syllabus as it is they will be accused of teaching and testing an increasingly small subset of the relevant information. On the other hand, senior professionals had to study hard to qualify and are likely to resist any initiatives to change the nature of the qualification to focus more on skills and judgement, on the grounds that it is lowering the hurdle and downgrading entry to the profession. If this conjures up stereotypical images of the oldest, most traditional professions, ask yourself why new taxi drivers still have to pass The Knowledge. I’d frankly rather they used a Sat. Nav.

So for these reasons I suspect that our distance learning resources may be slowest to change, but we will continue to push from our end.

General professional development

Our work in this area is more and more focused on professional conduct and ethics. In this area we have already taken huge steps forwards. Whereas five years ago we might have created a course to explain the ethical code in place in a particular profession and thought we had done our job, we are now focusing more on the application of the principles in practice.

Our course for Resolution, designed to encourage family lawyers to take a less combative approach to their work, encourages learners to reflect throughout on a real case they are working on. A range of case studies for STEP (Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners) present complex scenarios and ask the users to make judgements based on the ethical code. The concepts are simple but in practice it isn’t as easy as you’d think. And our own Ethical Issues for Accountants is a vast array of case studies that the user can comment on and read the views of other professionals.

CPD

Our approach to CPD has always been pretty flexible and so it is easier for us to change than it may be for others. From our origins in 2000 we have always argued that we should look to facilitate learning rather than attempting to teach remotely. Professionals all come to a course with different perspectives. They operate in different specialist areas and have different levels of experience. So any course that tries to make them all learn a set bunch of facts is going to alienate most of them. The idea of taking someone through the basic principles, getting them to engage and think and offering them access to more information for reference where they are interested, has always been central to our approach, and so we have been well placed to embrace these new ideas.

Over the last eighteen months, we have taken a further step forwards with the launch of our peer enriched learning courses. These tend to deal with an issue or debate. The learning takes place in a series of three-step activities. Firstly the learner is asked a question which they consider and construct a reply to. Next, they read an expert summary of the key issues. Finally they read their peers’ contributions. While this may be an inefficient way to teach lots of facts, it is a excellent way to change attitudes and broaden horizons.

Compliance

This is the area of our work where we have the most challenging conversations with our partners. Whether we are talking to an organisation that is concerned to make sure their employees understand the ins and outs of competition law, or to an individual professional signing up for a course to make sure they understand how to avoid a malpractice case, their instinct is to focus on what they need to know.

Although this makes intuitive sense, I think it is often misleading. I’m pretty convinced that you could write down what most people need to know about competition law on two sides of A4. When we teach them more, I wonder whether they remember it for much longer than it takes to pass the assessment. What matters is not whether they become expert, but whether we really succeed in changing their behaviour. So recently we have started to work on more and more case study based approaches to compliance. This seems to me to be a massive step forward. If we can focus more on whether people understand the limits of acceptable behaviour and less on their ability to commit a series of facts to their short term memory, we will be doing a great job.

So how does this all fit together? It seems to me that it continues to be the case that professionals in any particular sector need to learn some principles and how to interpret them and put them into practice. Add to that some more generic information management and retrieval skills and we will start to turn out some real 21st Century professionals and not just an army of Sisyphean disciples.

10 years on: How things have changed

by Alan Nelson

As part of Nelson Croom’s 10th anniversary celebrations, we have been looking back at how things have changed.

The Office for National Statistics recently announced changes to the basket of consumer goods which form the basis of two main inflation trackers, the consumer prices index and the retail prices index. This isn’t in itself noteworthy: changes are made fairly regularly to reflect changing consumer habits. Over time though, the changes reflect pretty major shifts in behaviours and attitudes. Indeed, only three items have remained constant throughout the basket’s history: sliced bread, sausages and flour.

This time round I was struck by a number of changes. Hairdryers have been removed in favour of hair straighteners and tongs. I don’t have much hair any longer so I’m not ashamed to say that that one had largely passed me by. There are no more bars of soap – only liquid soap dispensers. We have both in our house but I see the point. Also deleted are disposable cameras – who needs one when they have a camera on their phone? Most worrying, just as we have caught up at home with flat screen TVs, digital radios and DVD players, is the inclusion of Blue-ray disc players – I feel myself getting poorer again!

All this got me thinking about how attitudes have changed to online learning over the ten years that we have been in business. Ten years ago the people we worked with were pioneers and were fairly thin on the ground. Nowadays almost everyone we meet understands the rationale for what we do. The debate is more around the migration path from where they are now to where they would like to be.

There seem to me to be three main aspects to the change:

• The massive increase in personal use of the internet
• The perceived value of online resources
• The internet as a social tool

 

The internet for personal use

Ten years ago, most of the professional communities we engaged with were used to working with technology. They had PCs on their desks at work and in more or less sophisticated ways, they used them. The big change has come from the growth of home PCs. Back then, few people had a PC at home and those that did accessed the Internet via a dial up connection. Now the vast majority have a PC at home and a broadband connection.

It is the arrival of a PC and bandwidth at home, and frequently its use by children for school work, that has made decision makers in the professional bodies we work with decide that they must migrate their professional development services online. From study materials for professional qualifications, through general educational services, to structured and formalised CPD, the change has been dramatic and rapid.

 

Perceived value

Although the pace of change hasn’t always seemed as fast as we would have liked, there has been a rapid growth in the use of online services, most importantly at home. Online banking, comparison services for insurance quotes, Amazon (not only for books, but now for all our Christmas shopping!), BBC iPlayer – ordinary people using the internet every day to get stuff done and enjoy themselves. About five years ago my wife took the micky out of me because I moaned that she had thrown away the Yellow Pages. Now I wonder who keeps one at home: It just gets in the way and gives you out-of-date information.

How does this affect us? I remember one early conversation with an organisation that produced distance learning materials - ring binders to support students studying for their qualification. Printing the binders was expensive enough, but storing them in a warehouse and then sending them out to people who signed up was prohibitive. It was easy to demonstrate that they could do something better online and save money. But we couldn’t get over the loss of perceived value. If you signed up and paid your fee for study materials you expected a big box to arrive with stuff in it. Spin forwards ten years and the issue is no more.

Imagine you are a 23 year graduate living in London and taking a post graduate professional qualification. All you can afford as accommodation is a room in a shared house. The last thing you want is some big fat ring binders around the place. You see far more value in a good website where you can access the materials you need, complete learning activities and assignments, ask questions of a tutor and communicate with other students.

 

The internet as a social tool

All of which brings me onto the third and perhaps most significant factor – certainly the most exciting. Ten years ago the discussion was all about how we could provide content to people. We spent much of our time trying to persuade people to stop thinking of trying to teach remotely and to think instead of facilitating their learning. This was an important distinction even back then, but there were limits to how far you could go in offering a personalised experience.

The advent of Web 2.0 technologies has enabled us to move way beyond the idea of teaching online and instead create professional development resources that facilitate the community of learners building their awareness and understanding together.

And this is going to change ever more rapidly. As the current generation of teenagers grow up into the next generation of professional students they will expect a different kind of service. This is exciting and scary in roughly equal measure but it certainly keeps me interested!