Trainer Tools

This isn't just about how to do e-learning better, it's about how to use e-learning well to complement face-to-face learning and get more engaged learners, leave fewer people behind, improve learning retention, and make the job of the trainer more interesting and rewarding. In this episode Clint shared what he has learnt from developing Brainitz that we can apply to the corporate training world. If it works on teenagers, it's got to work on adults, surely! Clint Knox is a National Board Certified Teacher who’s taught grades 6-11th over the last 14 years. He is the CEO/Founder of Brainitz, an online video training tool that specializes in ease of use for the instructor and accountability for the student. Brainitz was founded out of a need in his own classroom and has now expanded into higher education and corporate training. For more information on Brainitz visit www.brainitz.com. Clint can be reached at clint@brainitz.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/clintknox/  

Under pressure of lockdowns and limited travel, many of us are rushing to create a decent virtual L&D offer to fill the gap. A lot of the time this is a lecture + PowerPoint slides delivered via Zoom rather than in a classroom, and that's really not good enough. In this episode of Trainer Tools, Paul Levy argues that we need to rethink the whole thingand not just transfer the old slides online. Paul Levy is a writer, facilitator and senior researcher at the University of Brighton and also an associate at Warwick Business School. He is the author of the books Digital Inferno and the Poetry of Change. He has been researching the impact of the digital realm on our personal and working lives for over fifteen years. As the world moved into lockdown over the Covid-19 outbreak, he has been working on useful ways of transitioning from physical to digital world education, as well as the blend of both. He is director of the change and transformation enabler CATS3000. He lives in Brighton in the UK.      

Three white middle-aged men chat about the importance of diversity and inclusion and how Learning and Development can help create more inclusive connected workplaces. With Rich and Ralph Brandt of RDR Group When it comes to diversity trainers, Ralph and Rich are not what you’d expect. Being white males and identical twins, they’re an anomaly. And yet, Ralph and Rich are living examples that bias can change. Growing up with a twin had its benefits — a constant playmate, a study partner, and a friend. But it was also an insular experience. Their natural tendency was to flock together as they went through life. Ralph and Rich tended to be less open to “outsiders” and as young children, anything different seemed foreign and uncomfortable. To further complicate things, growing up in the early 1960s, there were no people of colour in their schools, gender roles were tightly defined and people of other religions or sexual orientations were rarely discussed. Thankfully, a cultural revolution was coming. As the

In this episode John Tomlinson talks to Spencer Ayres about the future of work and what it means for L&D Spencer Ayres is an entrepreneur, product designer and educator focused on enabling people to become the best they can be through human and digital experiences. Spencer (link - https://spencerayres.com/) is Co-Founder and COO of Future Builders (Link - https://futurebuilders.co) - who's mission is to make meaningful learning as impactful and easy to access as possible, with the goal of maximising personal and professional productivity.    Prior to this Spencer has started and grown a number of startups, helped large organisations with the people side of digital transformation and was secondary school teacher for 8 years.    Whilst at the coding bootcamp school, Makers Academy, Spencer created and spun out a new company focused on creating the best Technology apprenticeship in the country. This grew from an idea to multimillions in revenue within a year and has now become the main focus for the whole

How we measure learning makes a big difference. The right measure can be motivational and harnessing gamification to get a virtuous circle going that reinforces learning, the wrong measures can do the opposite. They can be a costly overhead that reward the wrong behaviours, demotivate, and probably track things that don't really matter. In this episode I talk to Rich Lanchantin of Qstream about the importance of productivity/performance metrics in a company's ROI measurement of their L&D efforts. Rich Lanchantin sets the Qstream vision to ensure our microlearning solution delivers long term value and measurable outcomes for our enterprise customers, partners, their employees and our investors. Prior to Qstream, Rich spent 30+ years in customer success and sales leadership roles for notable life sciences and software companies. He is dedicated to listening to customer, market and internal feedback to continuously inform product, sales, services and marketing direction to fuel Qstream’s growth and custome

In February 2020, Ulead Media invited me to speak at the L&D Summit event in Madrid. My session was about the future of L&D, and what we needed to do to stay relevant and get right into the heart of the organisation. In this talk I share six things I think we need to do to achieve that. Thanks to Ulead for inviting me.          

In this podcast Krystyna Gadd talks to Harriet Bell, Marketing Director from Emerald Publishing, about what their marketing department needs from Learning and Development. What's great about this interview (in my opinion) is that in the last section, Harriet's view exactly fits with my own about what we need to be doing: close partnerships with the business, focussing on problem area and performance opportunities, and co-creating content to fit their specific needs and circumstances. Harriet Bell has worked in academic publishing for over 20 years, and is now a Board member for Emerald Publishing which is an independent social science and humanities publisher. Harriet is responsible for global marketing and product development for Emerald at a time of exciting opportunity and change, moving towards innovative content formats to more broadly communicate research findings, supporting open science and above all looking at the role publishers can play in supporting research impact. Krystyna Gadd is a leading a

Stand-up comedians have to be confident storytellers who keep the attention of their audience for long periods of time, they also work hard on "finding their voice" so they know who they are when they dare to stand on stage under the lights and demand their audience's attention - so what skills and techniques do they develop to pull this off, and what can we use in L&D? Sam Carrington is a working stand-up comedian who has done over a thousand gigs, including three stints at the world famous Edinburgh Festival. He also runs Smirk Experience, a company that runs corporate training events about how to use the skills and techniques of comedy to improve your confidence, communication and leadership ... in their words, they "harness the power of comedy to transform people and businesses"     

In this episode, Krystyna Gadd talks to change management expert Alison Kelly from Hitachi Capital about the future of work and L&D, and how Learning and Development can get closer to the business and provide better support Alison Kelly has led a range of large scale change programmes in a number of different businesses, often focusing on organisational re-structure, changes to business processes, systems and locations. She enjoys building and leading high-performing, loyal teams and has done so in both Business Change and IT functions, being responsible for 100-150 professional delivery people at any time. She likes to take a strategic perspective and work collaboratively to bring different disciplines together to make progress. She thinks of herself as both straightforward and resilient. Krystyna Gadd is a leading authority on accelerated learning and its application in the UK. As an engineer in a former life, it has shaped her thinking towards creating learning that creates measurable performance im

A discussion with Nadja Petranovskaja about the value of the training room in creating shiny eyes (motivation, confidence etc.) and having no agenda for the workshop so we follow their path, not yours Nadja Petranovskaja has more than 20 years of experience as a psychologist. After completing her studies in Hamburg, the native Russian gained international experience as a consultant, project manager, and manager in numerous industries. Specializing in change management and motivation, Nadja feels secure in various roles. Among other things, she has had overall responsibility for an IT project portfolio in Eastern Europe, accompanied by mergers from banks, optimized processes and built an aircraft. She found out what has led to success in multinational highly complex projects: PEOPLE who enjoy their work and look forward to every Monday. In 2011, Nadja changed her perspective and since then, as an independent entrepreneur, has devoted herself to the task of making organizations and teams fit for the future.

In this episode, Krystyna Gadd takes over the interview seat and talks to Janet Barr from Cap Gemini about what the business wants and needs from learning and development. Janet Barr is the Technical Director for Capgemini but also an executive architect with over 25 years IT experience. She has a solid technical engineering background and has a key interest in problem solving, while using her business experience. She has been with Capgemini since 2000 Krystyna Gadd is a leading authority on accelerated learning and its application in the UK. As an engineer in a former life, it has shaped her thinking towards creating learning that creates measurable performance impact. She has been training trainers since 2008, through CIPD professional programmes and her own workshops. She has published a book “50 ways to Accelerate Learning”, which expands on her “5 Secrets of Accelerated Learning” that she shared in the Training Journal article “Quick off the Mark”. Both these publications help to dispel some of the myt

I am re-releasing some older episodes that had really useful content, although I might be a bit crap - but it's only the third I recorded! In this one, I talk to Shirley Gaston of Azesta about how to keep learners engaged throughout the training event. This is Shirley's specialist subject, something she's been passionate about for years, In the podcast she outlines three different approaches for ensuring the delegates on the course stay engaged. Shirley Gaston is the founder of  the experiential learning company Azesta which has been developing people for 16 years. As such, she is one of the driving forces within the company. She values openness and this quality is intrinsic to her learning programmes.  It is important to her to be really approachable and, although highly professional, her overt friendliness is part of her style. Shirley’s passion for learning through experience has led to her working in learning and development for her entire career and she was approached four years ago to be the sole di

Hi, now and again I release an occasional podcast about leadership.  Some of this will be looking at leaders in the real world and discussing what we can learn from their successes and failures. It's not political, but it discusses political leaders, both past and present, but focuses on their leadership behaviours and not their politics. This first episode looks at the top three things that Theresa May got wrong, and here is a link to the written version of this content on my blog: The End of May: why Theresa May was a rubbish leader This was originally recorded as a video for my YouTube channel, but I deleted it because I decided running a YouTube channel was too much extra work, but then I changed my mind and re-launched the channel, so maybe I will re-record it one day.  

A lot of organisations espouse the value of "learning", some even have it as an official "value" and have fancy posters to inspire people to learn, but few really live it, putting learning at the centre of what they do. Service industries succeed (or fail) almost entirely on the knowledge, skills, and behaviours of their people, so their ability to learn - and therefore improve performance - throughout their whole career is even more important. In this podcast I chat to Sarah Brennan and Rachel Sedgwick of JDX Consulting, a company that has done just that: put L&D at the heart of who they are and how they succeed. Sarah Brennan, is the Global Head of Learning and Developmen at JDX Consulting Having worked as a leadership consultant to JDX since early 2016, Sarah joined the company in 2017 as the CEO of Create Edge and Global Head of L&D. Sarah has over 15 years’ experience as a trainer, facilitator, HR professional and international executive coach. Fully CIPD qualified, an NLP Master Practitione

In this month's podcast, I talk to Dr Katie Nielson about the role of language learning in organisations and the impact it can have on the motivation and the bottom line. We look at how to create great language programmes, the science of language learning, and how to understand the ROI. For the past seven years, Dr. Katie Nielson has been the Chief Education Officer at Voxy, an educational technology company focused on helping global teams improve careers and performance through personalized language learning at scale. Katie ensures that learners are getting the most efficient and effective educational experience possible.   Prior to this, she worked at the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language, where she served as the Principal Investigator on large-scale projects researching the efficacy of technology-mediated language training products. She has taught Second Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics at the graduate level at Hunter College and has facilitated numerous teacher tr

In this month's podcast, we talk to communications experts Dale Ludwig and Greg Owen-Boger of Turpin Communications about their leadership development work, and how they work with leaders to train and coach them on improving their "executive presence" Greg Owen-Boger is the Vice President of Turpin Communication, a business communication training company in Chicago. He started with Turpin as a cameraman in 1995 and quickly moved on to instructor/coach, project manager, account manager, and now VP. Over the years he has coached countless employees and leaders to be more effective presenters, facilitators, and trainers. Prior to joining Turpin, he was a Project Leader for a boutique consultancy that uses live theatre to initiate the leadership development process. Prior to that, he was an actor. Greg was the 2015 President of ATD, Chicagoland Chapter. He is a frequent blogger, popular speaker, and the co-author of two books: “The Orderly Conversation: Business Presentations Redefined” and “Effective SMEs: A

In this episode I speak to Kevin M Yates and Krystyna Gadd about how learning and development needs to align itself to business needs and focus on performance improvement – using data, or “facts” as Kevin calls them – if we, and our Learning and Development brothers and sisters, are to thrive and make a real difference! Krystyna Gadd is a leading authority on accelerated learning and its application in the UK. As an engineer in a former life, it has shaped her thinking towards creating learning that creates measurable performance impact. She has been training trainers since 2008, through CIPD professional programmes and her own workshops. She has published a book “50 ways to Accelerate Learning”, which expands on her “5 Secrets of Accelerated Learning” that she shared in the Training Journal article “Quick off the Mark”. Both these publications help to dispel some of the myths surrounding accelerated learning. There are 5 broad areas or “secrets” to accelerated learning, that Krys shared in a recent article

In this episode I talk to Jeff Long about some simple tips that make a big difference to improving how you record videos for learning Since 2003 Jeff Long has worked with companies, organizations, and entrepreneurs to help them create engaging online courses, dynamic training videos, and flexible websites. He specializes in creating online courses and his superpower is helping you create effective online course videos. His website and podcast can be found at https://onlinecoursecoach.com along with other videos, training, and resources  

Leadership development is a big topic, it cannot be reduced to a series of bullet points stuck on PowerPoint slides. If we are to develop great leaders, we need patience, and we need to provide impactful experiences and create learning spaces where leaders can work with colleagues to learn, reflect, and grow. Simulations can be an enjoyable and effective part of that ... if they are well-designed! In this podcast we talk to Bjorn Billhardt and Matt Confer who share their top five tips to creating great leadership development simulations Bjorn Billhardt is the CEO of Abilitie. Prior to founding Abilitie in 2015, Bjorn was the CEO of Enspire Learning, Inc., a custom e-learning development company he co-founded in 2001. Abilitie offers award-winning team-based leadership simulations that hone people management, business acumen, and strategic leadership skills. Abilitie’s simulations have been utilized by over 40 members of the Fortune 500 in more than 30 countries around the world. Bjorn is a recognized aut

In this episode of the Trainer Tools podcast, I welcome back Garry Platt to continue discussions on his specialist subject: Transactional Analysis. Transactional Analysis, or TA, is a theory of how humans interact with each other - its main application being to help understand human behaviour and communication: each interaction between people being called a "transaction". It was developed by Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne and has been a tool in the trainer and coach toolbox for many years in helping us understand ourselves and our own interpersonal behaviours, but also understand those of others. In this episode Garry talks about "Drivers", also known as "working styles" and this builds on the first TA series This podcast includes a promotion for the 2019 Learning and Development Executive Summit Garry Platt is an experienced training consultant with more than 30 years experience in the business. He has worked with a number of international organisations helping them to enhance their approach to trainin