Hi,

Thanks for coming to the AHRI Young HR Professionals talk Monday night. It was great to meet you and I hope you took some useful ideas away.

As I said, there are so many potential 'holes' in the learning and performance pipeline, and my work is about helping learners patch those holes up and excel in their work, fast. Once learners are positioned correctly in their career and know what they want from their work, they can then define and work on the win:win between themselves and their employer.

We talked about identifying learning needs. When a learner is motivated to learn because of their career positioning (and because they believe in what their organisation or team does) and they understand the pay­off ($ + rewards) to themselves personally, they become keen to learn how to do their own learning needs analysis. They just want to know how to get better at their job! Of course they can do this with the support of their manager, and L&D.

It's the tools, techniques and approaches I teach employees, to take charge of their learning and performance and drive their career in the right direction for theirs and their organisations benefit. It helps make all subsequent courses/learning much more effective. Much of my work is with graduates as it's an obvious place to start helping people create and refine their learning and performance engine. Although I work too with L&D departments and middle, and senior management (if they're still open to learning!)

And if you have any questions for me yourselves, I'd be happy to answer. I may email back direct, or answer into a blog post and send you that.

Don't forget to chase your partner up on the one change you're going to make in your work. No point in being 'all talk'! (L&D/HR are setting the example of how to turn learning into action right?) I'd love to hear how you go too.
Good luck in helping your employees take some of the weight off your shoulders, and take more responsibility for their performance, and keep in touch,

Mark

P.S. I didn't mention that in the 2009 Corporate Executive Board's global L&D survey, "Creating a Culture of Employee­Owned Development" was rated by 81% of L&D executives as 'very valuable'. If learners can be inspired and taught how to learn faster and more easily, and convinced that the career rewards from this are more easily within reach (and they are), L&D's challenge becomes much easier. Attraction, engagement, retention, leadership and performance will all improve.

P.P.S Please leave me a comment below! Whether you have a question, or some feedback it would be great to hear your thoughts on what we discussed and maybe we can continue the discussion between us.

5 FREE Workshops

If you think I can add value to your organisation and would like me to talk to your colleagues over a coffee or to run a free 1 hour introductory workshop on "How HR can become strong self­directed learners" please connect us.

I'm offering 5 of these only before Christmas to people serious about their performance and willing to work with me to get themselves results.  So first come first served. Contact me here.