Category: Technology Leadership Education

Alongside the established heavyweight acronyms of LOL, GWS and GSOH arrives the definitive acronym of our time.

Prior to Covid-19, WFH occupied a niche space in the acronym world …

World Federation of Healing

Wartime Flying Hours

Wages For Housework

Weep For Humanity (which might be pushing hard for top dog WFH status)

… but as we’ve been forced to adapt to lockdown, WFH has emerged as the acronym of choice and embedded itself into our everyday vocabulary.

Alongside this move to WFH has been a spike of activity and interest in E-learning and Learning from Home or (wait for it) ….. “LFH”.

Short Pause Here …

Before proceeding with this article I want to briefly acknowledge an increasingly heated debate taking place on forums like Linkedin, between people who want to use every lockdown minute for “upskilling” and those who don’t.

During this unprecedented crisis, just do whatever works for you. If you want to sit around all day in your pyjamas eating cheese and onion pringles, then please just do it. 

But if you’re yearning for a little eLearning, now is the time to fill your boots.

And so, without further ado, we present you with CTO Academy’s quickfire guide to E-learning and LFH;

1. E-learn at your own pace. 

Classroom learning will generally proceed at the pace of the slowest and when it came to anything technical or language based, that was often me. 

E-learning enables you and your employees to pace themselves and as students can access the material anytime they want, and anywhere they are, they can set a pace and training schedule that suits their lifestyle and demands.

You don’t need to follow the pace of the group and you can skip what you already know or don’t need to add.

At CTO Academy we create personalised learning paths based not only around the skills our users want to build but also the timeline and schedule that works best for them. 

2. Find the Right Lecturer. 

Traditionally you paid your money, signed up to a course, arrived the first day and met your Teacher or lecturer. If the set up felt wrong then it could be quite a challenge and cost to change.

With online learning you normally get a chance to taste first, buy later. 

You can study your lecturer(s) and their style of delivery before deciding if you like the cut of their gib and making that commitment to buy.  

3. How to Manage Distractions. 

One negative about eLearning is the risk of distraction.

Things that often distract me  … 

– 6 year old daughter

– Chocolate hobnobs

– Social media

You definitely need to instill a discipline to your schedule, your space and what you want to achieve from each session. Food grazing and family interruptions need to be kept to a minimum.

You can also look into ways of collaborating online with people of a like mind who can foster a collective focus and accountability.

As an example, members of the London Writers Salon meet each weekday at 0800 around the Zoom hearth.

But this is not your standard Zoom conference call. 

Nothing is said between 0805 and 0855 but instead, similar to working in a library and enjoying the benefits of that mutual conspiracy of cerebral silence, we motivate each other just by being amongst like minded people and making ourselves accountable.

My writing focus has been transformed. 

4. Find Niche, Enjoy Experimentation.

E-learning enables you to drill deep into a particular topic, find experts in the smallest of niche and listen to A list celebrities explain how to make a movie.

It also allows you to experiment and try something completely different, probably for a very small outlay and from the comfort of your own home. 

You don’t have to be searching down some dark lane for a late night evening class, after an exhausting day at work.

Today you can turn on, tune in, and never get out of your slippers.

5. Technology Changes Everything. 

Technology is transforming education (for adults and children) with an expanding range of E-learning tools transforming what is possible away from the traditional class or lecture room.

The current lockdown for many parents = home schooling and accessing a range of online tools that help us manage and teach through this crisis. It’s been a wonderful experience personally though I appreciate now more than ever, that patience is a prerequisite of good teaching and not something you can hand over to technology.

From a corporate perspective the quality of E-learning analytics and measurable outcomes is improving all the time with data that enables participants to measure different aspects of the learning process and effectiveness such as completion rates (notoriously low with online learning), grades, engagement. 

6. Employee Retention.  

Cutting edge training and E-learning programmes are absolutely key to maintaining employee satisfaction and retention.

The fight for talent requires many incentives and you cannot afford to neglect the training requirements of your teams.

“The only thing worse than training employees and having them leave, is not training them and having them stay” – Henry Ford

Conclusion

These recent changes of behaviour with WFH and LFH are driving growth and innovation into the E-learning market, for personal and professional growth.  Learning tools are becoming more sophisticated and aligned to a user’s lifestyle and ambition.

It’s a market that is adapting constantly to try and make the material sufficiently engaging to deliver a deeper impact on the student.  

Features such as gamification, branching scenarios and simulations are being added so that material is more interesting and engagement rates increase (always notoriously low with E-learning platforms).

If you’ve not been yearning for E-learning before now, what’s stopping you?

Leadership doesn’t always come naturally to everyone, particularly for those people with a technical background. But picking up leadership skills is crucial if you’re going to have an impact at the senior level and with any significant management role. 

Whether you have firm ambitions to take a senior tech role or you’ve almost fallen into a managerial role by accident, it’s quite likely that you will need some level of leadership training to help you bridge any skills gaps.

A firm foundation of leadership training will help you direct your team effectively towards success. This is a crucial part of reaching your goals and you should be expecting your employer to help you find the right leadership courses.

What is Leadership Training?

As a leader, you need to be the driving force of your team and those stakeholders looking to you for leadership. You are the person who will push your team to bring out the best of each individual, to reach their full potential, and achieve the corporate goals but also the individual career goals for yourself and your team. 

Leadership training courses are generally about building up your soft skills, the ability to lead and manage people.

Specialized programs are designed to help you explore leadership techniques and discover if and where you might have any skills gaps. The good courses should help you to refine key skills required to become an effective tech leader, including assertive communication, coaching, and motivation methods.

Why is Leadership Training Important?

It’s not just important, it’s crucial.

Even natural leaders require help in fine tuning their skills and training also enables you to bring in best practice and often learn from those around you.   

The best tech leaders can transform organizations, create efficiencies, enhance value creation, and engage their employees to deliver better results and for many it’s historically been a case of learning on the job and often, learning from your mistakes.

CTO Academy was launched because of all the C-level roles, that of CTO is the one that often lacked managerial and leadership training. 

What to Expect from Leadership Training?

Focus and Improve on Soft Skills

Being a great leader is often about being human and learning the softer skills and messaging around which people, teams and organizations can prosper.

Core leadership practices include:

• Being a role model
• Being positive
• Encouraging collaboration
• Focusing on following a vision
• Making an impact

Identify Your Leadership Style

A good leadership training will help you identify your leadership style. Expect that you will assess yourself on the type of leadership you possess, how the people see you, and your way of delegating tasks to members.

How to Delegate

Leaders face one big problem: They want to do it all. However, you simply can’t do it all! One of the hardest things to do as a leader is to delegate and negotiate tasks.

You might feel that doing all of the work yourself is the best way to get results. However, as a leader, you have to distribute the workload among your team.

In leadership training, expect to learn courses on how to delegate in different ways. Most likely, the general steps to discuss would be:

• Define the task at hand
• Make sure it is SMART (specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, timebound, ethical recorded)
• Identify the best team or team member for the job
• Communicate why they have been selected
•  Explain the goal to be achieved
• Discuss how the task should or could be executed
• Agree on a deadline
• Keep communication open through the duration of the task
• Provide feedback after completion

Motivating a Team

Studies suggest that positively motivating a team is a great way to improve employees’ effectiveness and efficiency.

In the leadership training program, you will understand how a motivated team feels when they are recognized for their hard work. You will be learning the fundamentals of keeping your team members motivated

Make Good Decisions

What was the last big decision you made at work? Perhaps you had changed tactics last minute when you were trying to close a sale or tried something new on social media to reach a larger audience.

Decision making is one of the most important skills you can learn as a leader. Just as we all have a personality type, we also have decision-making types. These are other aspects to discuss under a leadership training program

Managing Conflict

You are tired, and your team has been working hard to meet a deadline. Right at the last minute, it all falls through. Everyone is emptied, and tensions have started to rise.

Did you experience this?

Managing conflict might be one of the stricter leadership training topics. The trick is to keep calm and communicate. But it’s one of those skills that are usually easier in theory than they are in practice.

The type of techniques you will learn on an excellent management training course will include:

• Confronting the situation
• Collaborating to problem solve
• The formal complaints process
• Understanding why conflict arises
• Handling narcissistic personalities at work
• Managing stress and emotions

Performance Management

Performance management is the process of creating an environment at work that allows people to perform their best and aligned with the company’s objectives. As a manager, it’s your responsibility to make sure your team is performing.

So, here is the question, how many times a year do you monitor and feedback your team’s performance?

Performance management is a continual process.

It is a continuous cycle of setting goals, planning how to achieve those goals, reviewing the progress, and further developing the team’s skills.

In the leadership training program, you will learn:

• Conducting annual appraisals
• Giving feedback
• Empowering employees
• Using performance management tools
• Using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Implementing personal development plans

Learning these techniques in leadership training programs for managers will provide you with the knowledge to successfully monitor, analyze, and progress with your team’s performance.

Digital Leadership Skills

Every organization needs to embrace new technologies if they want to flourish. And, those with the most capable digital-ready leaders will continue to stay ahead of the curve.

When you are in a leadership training course, you will learn how to get your business updated digitally. This might involve syncing up calendars on Gmail, communicating using Skype, or any other digital tools that help people communicate faster and work more efficiently.

How CTO Academy Help With Leadership Skills?

CTO Academy provides leadership training programs that are focused on helping tech leaders build up the managerial and soft skills required to become an effective leader.

We know you have the technical skills nailed. We’re here to help you build your leadership skills.

Learning those skills is what will make you stand out in a competitive crowd and achieve the career and reward you want.

[We liked an article by Lydia Lynch at Learndash.com so much, we’re re-producing it here]

Refresher training helps keep important knowledge fresh and current.

Whether your a student or a teacher, one thing we all know for personal experience is that knowledge fades over time. Our brains are very efficient at dumping information we don’t need, and the best way we have of showing our brain that the information is still useful is by using it. It’s a classic case of “use it or lose it.”

What this means for learning is that most of us need a review of important concepts from time to time. And this is where refresher courses come into play. A refresher course is designed to bring learners back to the basics, so that they can review some of the fundamentals they may have forgotten, or brush up on new information they may not be aware of.

There are several reasons why refresher training is so important. A few of them include:

1. It builds long-term memory.

Our memory is like a muscle. In order to strengthen it, we need to keep it challenged. The best way to train our memory is to test how long we can go before we start to forget something. It’s easy to remember something you only heard a couple seconds ago. The longer the interval between first hearing a piece of information and having to recall it, the better we remember it. Offering a refresher course plays into this by challenging your learners to recall information they may not have thought about for several months.

2. It reduces mistakes and improves productivity.

Refresher courses are like a fire drill. When we review processes and procedures until following them becomes second nature, we’re less likely to mess up in a place where it counts. Practice makes perfect, and in some ways, that’s exactly what a refresher course is.

3. It offers an effective warmup for students or employees who have taken a break.

Life happens. Your learners may take time off a course of study to handle personal issues at home. Your employees will go on maternity leave, or take a hiatus, or be out sick. After a few months off the job, they’ll be a bit rusty. Design your refresher course to bring them back up to speed.

4. It keeps coworkers on the same page and makes learning part of the culture.

Good things happen when companies make learning part of the culture. Not only does it keep the knowledge and expertise of the company running at top levels, but it shows employees that they are valuable.

However, for this to really work well, everyone needs access to learning opportunities. Industries, technology, and company protocols change over time. If your new hires are learning one set of rules and best practices, it may put them in conflict with the old guard who learned something completely different. Company-wide refresher courses help keep the whole culture in step.

5. It keeps employees up-to-date on industry training.

Speaking of industry change, refresher training offers the perfect opportunity to keep your employees on the cutting edge of any new developments. This is especially important in technical fields, where the industry evolves so rapidly that being behind by even a few months can have negative consequences for your business.

As an expert in your own field, you should be able to identify the biggest changes as they happen. Keep track of these and be ready to go over them in your refresher course.

6. It helps learners remember important but seldom-used information.

You may have heard of the Urgent/Important matrix in decision making. The idea behind it is that you should prioritize tasks that are urgent and important first while avoiding tasks that are both unimportant and also not urgent. The trick lies in striking the appropriate balance between the urgent and unimportant tasks, and the non-urgent but still important tasks.

There are plenty of urgent tasks that, while not incredibly important, still need to happen—like responding to an email, for instance. But there are a lot of things that are non-urgent because they rarely come up, but which would be incredibly urgent if the need to do something about them ever arose. A refresher course can keep that information sharp in your learners’ memory so that they aren’t caught flat-footed in a time of need.

7. It develops managers into future instructors—and vice versa.

They say that the best way to learn is to teach. If you’re trying to find good managers for your business, asking select employees to run the training program is a great way to find qualified candidates. The ability to guide learners through a refresher course is good training for a more prominent manager position. After all, a bad manager gives orders, but a good manager gives instructions.

8. It identifies knowledge gaps and training needs.

Finally, a refresher course is the perfect way to suss out and remedy deficiencies in the current training protocols. If you begin running a refresher program and notice that employees are consistently receiving low scores in a portion of the program, that’s a sign that you need to offer more support in that area of training.

It may be that your original on-boarding procedures didn’t cover that area thoroughly, or that you’re dealing with an edge case scenario. Either way, spotting the gap means you can fill it before it becomes a potential problem.

Giving your learners a “why” provides motivation for the future.

Despite the obvious utility of refresher training, it’s not uncommon to meet resistance. Most of us don’t like going over old material, because it can feel like a waste of time. The benefits of a refresher course can be lost on many of us if we aren’t aware of how close we came to forgetting material that the refresher course was just in time to help us remember.

That’s why it’s important to start with a strong “why.” Give your learners a good reason to take the course, and they’ll be more committed. And if they understand the reasoning and are enthusiastic about the course, they’ll be more successful in taking it as well.

Original article : https://www.learndash.com/8-reasons-why-refresher-training-is-a-good-idea/

Written by Laura Lynch, a marketing specialist with experience presenting at WordPress events in Ann Arbor and Vienna. She speaks Russian and German and holds a double MA (Hons) in History and Russian Studies from the University of Edinburgh.

Find out more about Learndash here