Management Training – What’s your Blend?

Today’s global workforce makes it more important than ever for organisations to have flexible means of accessing meaningful management training programmes. As today’s workforce becomes more global and mobile, a question for HR and training professionals is, how do you deliver value driven training to a remote management teams who may be working from different locations, countries and continents?
Whilst 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 a must for many organisations today. Whilst blended approaches are widely advertised, the challenge is packaging the different elements of learning in a joined-up, seamless way that helps the management team collaborate, make visible progress and get 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 build learning progressively and delivers clear outputs. These outputs will ideally integrate a professional management qualification as a recognition of learning, achievement and managerial competence.
If a management programme isn’t ‘well blended’, it can feel clunky and isolated. Many factors influence the ‘blend’ that is right for the organisation; such as the business needs, infrastructure, 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. It also has to offer different means of learning over and above face-to-face delivery, such as 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 and ensuring that management development programmes have structure, line manager support and accountability from the outset.

To help analyse the blend of your management development training, get in touch at [email protected]