AI, VR, AR, optimisation, the digital economy… When the competition in your field is panting, the market is changing like a kaleidoscope, and a technological breakthrough is announced every quarter, it’s easy to feel left behind. But it’s not worth succumbing to panic.
Nor should you uncritically trust the advertisements and brochures of so-called box tools. Even the most brilliant system needs to be aligned with your processes, calibrated and clearly communicated. You need someone in the organisation to work with the new solution and make the necessary decisions. In short, you need competence. And the most advanced systems require more than a one-minute YouTube video or even a 40-minute onboarding session provided by the vendor.
Where to find good professionals?
You can hire experts, as long as you offer them competitive terms and take the time to implement them into the realities of your business. You can hire a specialist company with experience in providing services or implementing the solutions you are interested in. Finally, you can train them yourself, developing digital and creative skills within your team.
A wide range of vocational and postgraduate courses, national and international, full-time and distance learning, make it possible to retrain employees in many areas. But finding programmes that teach what you need, that combine theory and practice, that allow you to immediately apply the skills you’ve acquired to your company’s operations, that are affordable, and that don’t take two semesters? Not easy, but possible.
Salad Buffet
For a number of years I have had the pleasure of developing and delivering a range of specialised training and development programmes for the companies we work with in Poland and the European Union.
We have tested and analysed the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of approaches, drawn from the universities our staff work with, and from courses and training we run ourselves. With a team of experienced (and eager to share knowledge) researchers, designers and innovators, we have helped build a foundation of UX knowledge and the use of industry-specific software. We have helped design banking solutions and transport services.
We have taught management consultants how to plan and conduct research, and how to design the logistics of construction and refurbishment programmes. We have also taught management teams how to plan for business growth and digitalisation in a rapidly changing business environment.
We have designed our offering as a healthy and tasty customisable salad bar. With over 50 training modules to choose from, you can pick and choose your portion of knowledge, tailored to the appetite and needs of the team you want to develop. Modules last between one and three hours, depending on the audience and level of practicality required. For example, we offer a change management module for board members as a two 1-hour sessions, while for project team members the practical modules last a total of 6 hours and end with the creation of an initial action plan.
Similarly, a module on working with a brief and research plan at a tactical level (for team leaders and project managers) lasts an hour and a half, and for researchers and designers even three hours, including the preparation of the documents discussed. In this way, a specific development programme is made up of several or more modules selected from the offer according to the company’s needs and the time and financial budget available.
In addition, clients decide on the number of hours of mentoring required to achieve the desired results. This is usually 15-20 hours per participant. During this time, the employee carries out a project in their company under the guidance of a mentor who specialises in the area and industry concerned.
Your own school of excellence
What does such a programme look like in practice? We start by specifying what our client needs. We do not ask the team leader or board members to define the silhouette of a development programme graduate. We help diagnose what skills the team lacks, what skills we can build on, and what impact the organisation wants to have after the programme.
We choose the type of training, the exact programme and the timing according to the needs and capabilities of the organisation and the participants. We illustrate theory with examples from our project portfolio and key skills are practised in the classroom. Our mentors monitor the quality of the projects delivered by the programme participants.
We monitor participants’ progress, respond to feedback and certify the level of completion of the programme. If we see a need, we will identify areas where the team needs retraining to become more effective and self-sufficient.
The result is your own development programme, tailored to your organisation, with the quality guaranteed by a company with 15 years’ experience and expert practitioners working with business and academia.
Is it worth investing in people’s development?
Three years ago, we started talking about how to make project services more accessible to the bank’s teams. The idea was to support both customer service improvement projects and teams developing and improving systems for staff. Design skills were identified as being in short supply, so we focused on this area when designing the development programme.
The 2023 programme for BNP Paribas Bank Polska, led by nine trainers, involved 14 participants who attended 40 hours of training over 12 weeks. They had 20 hours of meetings with mentors and spent at least another 20 hours of their own time designing the solution.
In each edition, 5 participants take part in 3 workshop cycles, during which they train and practice in the areas of user and business needs gathering, analysis, process and software design, prototype development and testing. Each cycle consists of a theoretical and practical part and individual project work, supported by a mentor. Participants and bank mentors receive ongoing information to monitor progress.
As a result, each participant completes the programme after three months not only with a developed prototype solution to a current project problem, but also with a certificate of acquired competence and a plan for further development.
"I am new to this area, so I am pleased that the programme has given me the opportunity to get up to speed more quickly. So far, I have mostly relied on interviews with business users to gather requirements and needs. Now I am more aware of the need to conduct interviews or tests with end users. I can see that they can make a great contribution to the project itself". "Independence is very important to me, so I appreciated that the format of the training was flexible enough and not imposed from above, so that I could do certain things on my own and then have the opportunity to ask specific questions to the mentors. The project we worked on during the training has already been appreciated by my project team. The biggest surprise was the interactive prototype; up to this time we were under the impression that prototyping was too time consuming and not cost effective".
Are the participants happy?
AMS is a global leader in recruitment and outsourcing services (the world’s leading provider of talent acquisition services). For couple of years we have been helping them develop and optimise digital solutions. As the portfolio has grown, the Digital Automation team has benefited from our support, participating in two tailored development programmes. The most recent program, conducted entirely in English, involved training 2 analysts in usability research, including requirements gathering, solution testing, benchmarking and formulating design recommendations. Participants benefited from both theoretical and practical training, as well as mentoring support, and successfully completed various types of research.
We received feedback from the leader of participants of this programme. She appreciated the visible increase in their competence and independence. She also reported the satisfaction with the results and recommendations shared by the product and project owners, for whom the programme participants had conducted research.
Behind the scenes
We are working to expand our offering, and are currently introducing Artificial Intelligence topics. The courses are updated with examples from our own business and project practice, legal changes and tools innovations. We test new modules with our own staff, gathering feedback and ideas for improvement.
We monitor the quality of the mentors’ work and develop the workshop by creating and digitising our own tools. An invaluable source of ideas and feedback is our clients and training participants, from whom we collect and analyse feedback on an ongoing basis.
Are you interested in training tailored to your company’s needs? Or do you want to build your own development programme?
Get in touch with our business consultants.
