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.

The end of University as we know it?

by Andrew Turner

I’ve spent 4 of the past 5 years in higher education and I’m a real advocate, so you can imagine how dismayed I was to read in The Guardian that universities are “Full” and will “turn away record number of students”.  This shortage of places is before clearing has even opened and means that many people will be disappointed and miss out on the University experience. 

However Bill Gates may have the answer. Unsurprisingly it is in technology that the Microsoft mogul see’s the saviour of higher education, but despite his bias the option does seem viable.  By moving more material online and offering it through e-learning more students can access course material and Universities can become more flexible.   He’s billing it as a way of reducing university bills – a big issue in the US also, but it could also increase the number of university places. For Bill Gates, “College, except for the parties, needs to be less place-based”. This may be true but we’re really going to need to work on the parties’ angle.

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: How learning design has changed

by Angela Smith

I don’t know where we’re going, but I sure know where we’ve been…

Nelson Croom’s 10th Birthday celebrations have brought up a few feelings for me. For starters, it made me think about the fact that I’ve been at the company for six of those ten years. This thought makes me a) very proud and b) much older than I like to think I am. What’s that? Your thirties aren’t part of your twenties? Rubbish.

It also set me thinking about how we have changed our approach to learning design since I’ve been here. When I started, we had a very set way of approaching learning design. It revolved around the theory that there are four basic learning styles and we had three activity types which we mapped to these learning styles. In fact, we were pretty dogmatic about this approach and if anyone suggested that their programme should follow a different structure or – god forbid – be linear, we’d quite happily say “I’m afraid we don’t do that” and show them the door.

Over the past six years, I’ve seen our thinking on learning styles develop. We are still concerned with the concept of learning styles and, where appropriate, providing learners with the ability to choose their own route through their learning materials, but we are more open to the fact that we can offer the benefits of different activity types without explicitly labelling them and attaching them to a style of learner.

So why the big change? Well, firstly, we have learned a lot from our clients and the learning experts they work with, being exposed to new learning theory along the way. We’ve also learned from the collective wisdom of the industry as it moves forward and examines itself via conferences and industry communities. And of course, we’ve received feedback from the multitudes of learners who have been through our courses over the years.

Our response to all these influences has been to become more flexible in our approach to learning design. We can now bring ourselves to admit that sometimes a linear approach is the best one, whereas sometimes our classic Nelson Croom activity streams are most appropriate – and there are all sorts of exciting possibilities in between and perhaps beyond. In addition to this, our focus on learner community has grown with our technology and what we are hearing now is that getting to see what their peers have to say is of growing importance to our learners.

Our approach has also become more flexible as we work with more and more clients who have different learner groups with different needs. Working in the area of compliance, for example, prompted us to develop Imago to allow a more robust linear approach, but a linear approach which provided the scope for interactive branching case studies where the learner chose their own path – flexibility arising from seeming inflexibility.

If I can be permitted to go a bit Grand Designs on you, while the foundations of everything we build at Nelson Croom are still firmly rooted in our origins, the buildings that rise up from these foundations are appearing in ever more exciting shapes and configurations. Above all, I think this opening out of approach points to the fact that we are more confident in our scoping and development process and our expertise in learning than ever. It will be fascinating to see where the next ten years lead us.

Formal vs informal learning: a thought from Training Zone Live

by Jacqui Nelson

I had a great day on Tuesday at Training Zone Live. I learnt a lot, particularly about social media which was my main reason for attending. I’ll write more about that later but I wanted to share (that’s what social media is all about!) a couple of stories. Here’s the first;
The last session of the day was an ‘Ask the panel’ event. The panel included Peter Honey, Jim Kirkpatrick and Charles Jennings (who has appeared often in this blog). It was good to hear the majority (if not all) of the panel talking about how we need to move from thinking about ‘training’ people to thinking about enabling people to ‘learn’.

‘Facilitating learning NOT teaching’ is a concept central to what we do at Nelson Croom, and has been for 10 years. I think, it’s particularly important with online learning because the internet should be about freedom not constraint. It is in no small part due to the popularity of the internet that people now expect to be able to learn what they want to learn in a style that suits them. People want to discover not to be told. People want to learn, not be taught.

We embrace this in our courses; but for some of the panel this is not enough. They would like to take it further. Perhaps there should be no formal learning at all, just the learning that is part of our everyday life. The information we absorb, learning on the job etc.
I can see the point, and there is no doubt that more and more ‘learning’ is outside of a formal ‘classroom’ setting but I still think there is a place for a ‘course’. Here’s why.

I’ve been learning lots about social media recently. My learning has been purely self-directed and much of it has been ‘informal’ learning. (The best advice I got was to ‘follow a teenager around for a week – that’ll teach you about social media!’) But a good part of my learning has been formal too. I’ve watched videos on you tube, attended a webinar (ok, only lasted 8minutes then did my emails and got back on google)………… and I went to Training Zone Live, didn’t !?

I’m happy with my informal learning but there is a point where I want to interact with an ‘expert’ and that’s where I will look to ‘formal’ learning.

Knowledge will always be power

by Angela Smith

Like Alan, I also read Charles Jennings' recent article Less is more: A different approach to L&D in a world awash with information. Sad to say, it left me a little unsatisfied, but it did set all sorts of thoughts pinging off in my mind. I thought Jennings made some good points and would like to see him take them further – apologies to Mr Jennings if he has already elaborated elsewhere – I’m sure he has!

To quote Jennings, “Is it better to get people to commit information to memory, knowing that it will be short-lived (and possibly out of date when they come to use it), or help them become skilled in the approaches and techniques to find the current, correct information quickly when they need it? Think for a few seconds and it is obvious that the second strategy is the better one. Teach people to fish rather than providing them with fish.”

I have to disagree – I’m not sure that it is obvious that the second strategy is the better one unless we are talking only about pure information, rather than knowledge in the sense of the sum of the facts, skills and awarenesses of a person or group of people. This narrow definition of “knowledge” seems to apply only to a tiny proportion of the training and learning that goes on, particularly with adults in the workplace. And if Jennings is indeed simply talking about information, try applying his fishing analogy and where it seems to leave you is not “teaching people to fish” but “teaching people to find out what the current fishing techniques are”. Only really useful, I’d argue, if you already know how to fish. Or perhaps he’s talking about teaching them how to find out how to teach themselves to fish. Anyway, the metaphor is a bit wobbly. When do I learn to fish? I’ve got to do it some time.

The core of learning is not about straight information. It is about learning the background knowledge which allows you to put that information into context, the skills you need in order for the information to be useful to you and the attitudes you need to form to make the right judgements based on the information. You don’t look up your attitude whenever you want to know how to feel about something. Similarly, a skill is something that you possess, not something you can take out of a box and wear for half an hour.

Yes there should be a focus in basic education on helping people to develop the skills to navigate the minefield of information that's out there, to assess and assimilate what they find and to make reasoned decisions based on the information they find. However this is a separate issue to how we enable people to learn specific subjects. It’s a bit like saying that all we needed to do before was teach people how to find the bookshop, pick the right book and read it.

I'd argue that what Jennings is talking about is a specific general need of society, not an approach to training. What might this mean for learners? Time spent learning how to find up to date information is just a small element. The real implication is that it means more time spent on learning the key information needed for context, shaping attitudes and engaging in practice of the skills required.

It is also true that while we won’t necessarily want or need to learn everything about a subject, that doesn’t mean we won’t need to learn what is current as a basis from which to understand all the constantly updated information that is put to us. There must be a baseline and context in which to place what we learn. We wouldn’t say that because the IT world in constantly changing, developers should only ever look up what they need – you simply can’t begin that way. To pick up on Alan’s medical analogy, a surgeon who hasn’t learned the core skills of surgery is not a surgeon – he is a butcher with a book and you should get out of there fast.

Reading back over Jennings’ article to check I wasn’t wilfully misunderstanding him (I do enjoy disagreeing with people) it occurs to me that he makes a very interesting point at the beginning of the article about the current move towards social knowledge and knowledge sharing. However, he doesn’t, in this article, then go on to look at the real implications that this has for learning and training – how can we use this trend to enrich how we facilitate learning, but that’s a whole other blog…