Coping not planning? – by Henrietta Hopkins

Your chance to win a free Creating Capacity Learning Review

Our dilemma

Creating Capacity, Hopkins Van Mil’s learning social enterprise, had an interesting dilemma yesterday.  We had planned a really focused, brilliant course on Customer Care techniques with an excellent Creating Capacity trainer, Jerry Hurst.  We thought through our marketing plans carefully (as always!) and delivered targeted key messages to our users and beyond.  Happy with our work, we were surprised to see very little interest in the course.  In the end we decided to post-pone the session until the Autumn.  This isn’t the only course that we’ve had to delay recently.

Planning or coping?

Why am I telling you this?  Well, we had such a positive response from one of the people who now have to wait for the autumn to receive their training that it made me think.  Is everyone so busy coping at the moment that they have no time to plan for their training needs? Is everyone working so hard, on half the necessary resources, that they are unable to free up time to attend training?

Our potential user certainly believes so.  He said, ‘The problem is no one is looking to the future at the moment, just trying to get through the week.’  Anita and I would agree that this is certainly one of the main issues.  We are regularly told that the courses we offer are just right, really tailored to the needs of the sectors we support, and offer great opportunities for learning and sharing with peers, delivered by brilliant trainers in a relaxed environment.  We work with our user panel and review and react to the evaluations we receive.  In this way we can make sure we design a training course which responds to the long-term needs of individuals on a career path, and organisations aiming to make the best use of their staff.  But the question we are asking ourselves is what else can we do to encourage the sector to plan for the long-term?

Kick-start the learning journey

When did you last plan your learning journey and consider areas which would benefit your current job and long-term career path?  It could be a course, an action learning set, some mentoring, setting time aside to review professional journals, checking your Twitter feed for news and articles which will  help you be more effective – the list is endless and perhaps too daunting to tackle when all we are doing is coping with our daily work-load.  Or is it?

If you set aside half a day to consider your training plan you could find yourself much better off.  You will have:

• Identified the support you need to manage your work load in a constantly changing environment
• Evidence of the need to bring about change in your working life
• Considered the requirements for sustaining your organisation’s long-term aims and objectives
• Assessed all the practical low-cost options for professional development
• Knowledge that this will ensure a better service for users and audiences

Doing this on your own can be less focused and too subjective.  Creating Capacity offers learning reviews, giving individuals and organisations the opportunity to step-back from the daily grind and think about their learning needs with support and guidance from our expert team.

Win a learning review

During May we are offering the chance to win a free half-day learning review session with me or Anita.  We’d arrange a suitable time and place to focus on your current learning needs and long-term plans.   To apply simply email your interest to bookings@creatingcapacity.org with the subject heading Free Learning Review.  The names of all those who have responded by 31 May will be put in to a hat, and one will be drawn out to reveal the lucky winner.