Rachel
Burnham writes: Everyone has their own story to tell, their
own set of experiences from participating in an event like the CIPD L&D
Show, which took place this week at Olympia.
The L&D Show includes a conference, exhibition, free events during
the day and fringe events – so it is possible to participate in one of these
events and have a completely different experience from a colleague depending upon
which sessions you attended, which conversations you participated in, which
tweets you read and of course upon your own mindset.
As for me, I had a really good L&D Show – this year I
didn’t go to the conference, but was out and about around the exhibition and in
the free sessions. And the sessions I
participated in were amongst the very best I have experienced at this sort of
event. I felt that the sessions I participated in both
contained great content and were delivered in engaging ways, with not too much
sales pitch.
One of the first sessions I got involved in was titled ‘Learning
Science for Blended Learning’ and was from @iManage. It focused on introducing us to three areas
of research findings about how to make learning more effective:
· The learning
environment
· Spacing
out learning
· Interleaving
learning topics
Each topic was introduced and research shared. We were then encouraged to discuss our ideas
for applying this practically with our neighbours and tweet our ideas to the
presenter. Relevant content, delivered
in a lively and thought-provoking manner that helped us to digest it &
consider how to use it.
A number of sessions focused on the development needs of
our own profession, to enable us to be effective in meeting the challenges
facing our organisations. Each of these
sessions referred back to the recent report produced jointly by CIPD and the
benchmarking organisation Towards Maturity ‘L&D: Evolving Roles, EnhancingSkills’ which sets out very clearly that many of us in L&D have been
neglecting our development. There is an
urgent need to particularly develop:
- Business & commercial understanding of our own organisation;
- Skills in facilitation of social learning;
- Digital skills;
- Performance consulting; and
- Analytical skills.
One of the highlights of the free programme of sessions
were the two ‘Ignite Labs’ that took place – one on each day of the event. Each session involved a series of short
presentations – 5 minutes in length from a range of L&D practitioners, each
supported by 20 slides timed to change at 15 second intervals. Such a challenge! The topics included a great variety of topics
from: changing the approach to L&D in an organisation, practical examples,
appreciation, a dialogue approach to change management, the importance of
digital skills, improving the blood transfusion service in Uganda and moving
from lurking to learning on Twitter. I
particularly valued Jonathon Marshall’s session on changing approaches to
L&D at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the insight that ‘L&D
needs to get off the stage, but not leave the room’.
Other interesting sessions included exploring the value
of volunteering as a learning experience, something which CIPD has been
encouraging through the Steps Ahead Mentoring scheme and links with
iwill.org.uk. There are win-win-wins to
be gained here for the employee doing the volunteering, for the organisation in terms of
the impact of the learning & engagement and for the community benefitting.
It was good to hear Andy Lancaster, Head of L&D for
CIPD talking about the ‘Leaders in Learning’ Network which has been running for
about a year in London and which is now beginning to regionalise. This brings together people in L&D to
network, discuss great practice and case studies, talk technology, share research
and problem-solve together. These
evening sessions about 4 times a year are very interactive and are highly
valued by those who participate. Meetings
have recently been held in Scotland, East Anglia and future meetings will also
be taking place in Manchester for the North West.
One of the very last sessions, I participated in focused
on ‘storytelling’ and was led by the Royal Central School for Speech and
Drama. This session explored why story
telling is so important to us and how we can use it to aid learning in our
organisations. Early on in the session we
were invited to remember a favourite book from our childhood and to think about
why it had had such an impact on us – my choice was ‘Swallows and Amazons’ by
Arthur Ransome – it is full of strong female characters, each individual and
distinctive – apparently based upon the author’s own sisters. The session considered different ways of
using story telling and was full of inspiration for me – I know I don’t use story
telling as much as I might.
My overall impressions of the event - I have come away
with lots of ‘I could try that’ and ‘I’d like to find out more about that’. Were the ideas shared in the event brand new? Probably not, but
there was lots to learn, adapt and provoke thought & action for any
L&D professional. And that is good enough for me.
Rachel
Burnham
17/5/15
Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D
professionals become even more effective.
I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social
media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of
learning on performance.
Follow me on Twitter @BurnhamLandD
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