Blending Your Management Course
Today’s global workforce makes it more important than ever for organisations to have flexible means of accessing meaningful management courses. As the modern workforce becomes increasingly global and mobile, a question for HR and training professionals is:
How do you deliver value driven training to remote management teams who may be working from different locations, countries and continents?
Though face-to-face facilitated learning remains one of the most effective ways to deliver management training (due to the topics being largely behavioural), a flexible and blended approach is becoming imperative for many organisations today. Whilst blended approaches are widely advertised, the challenge is connecting the various elements of learning in a unified, seamless way that helps the management team collaborate. This enables visible progress and real results without taking excessive time out of the workplace. The right blend will be a well-planned mix of accessible, simple methods relevant to the learners, each of which building learning progressively and delivering clear outputs. These outputs will ideally integrate a professional management qualification as a recognition of learning, achievement and managerial competence.
However, a management course can feel clunky and isolated if it isn’t ‘well blended’. Many factors influence the right ‘blend’ for the organisation; such as the infrastructure, business needs, employee learning styles and available technology. The learning has to be in the context of the day-to-day and has to allow for implementation and review. In addition, it also has to offer different means of learning over and above face-to-face delivery, for example work-based projects/assignments, e-learning, action learning, collaborative forums and coaching.
Simple is often the best approach, as blending too many methods can over-complicate the delivery. Influencing the learner’s mind-set towards blended learning is key, along with ensuring that management development courses have structure, line manager support and accountability from the outset.
If you are interested in running a management course, please get in touch at [email protected] or go to management development courses