Mentoring Capacity

Shamelessly piggybacking on this week's CIPD Annual Conference, which I'm not attending this year, I'm fondly remembering the four years I worked there as a Commercial Learning Consultant, and enjoyed meeting and talking with members and clients at the conference.

I've been fortunate to be a member of, and to work with, both of my professional bodies - the #CIPD and The LPI (Learning and Performance Institute). Both roles brought together the accumulated knowledge, skills and experience I gained over 35 years as a Leader in Learning & Development.

It's those years, owning and running an IT Training business, working for other training providers and developing and leading training teams in the public, private and charity sectors, that I bring to my current role as a #ProfessionalMentor.

If you're in employment and looking for an experienced, external lens on your personal and professional development, or you're looking for work in the people professions and want to understand where you could fit, and to strategise your approach, get in touch.

I offer a no-obligation introductory chat to determine where and how I could support you getting to where you want to go. If we proceed, I'll ask you to articulate what your overarching objective/s are and what success will look like in you achieving them. That's when the work starts.

Interested? Contact me in the comments here, or via my LinkedIn Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/niallgavin/overlay/contact-info/

Professional Mentoring Unpicked #4

This is the next blog in my short series exploring the key aspects of mentoring others as a professional mentor.

Today I’m looking at Key Aspect 4: Skills, Knowledge, Career, and Personal Growth

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

“Mentorship encompasses a holistic view of professional development, including technical skills, industry knowledge, career advancement, and even personal attributes that contribute to professional success.”

Hmmm… how to write something about this that doesn’t sound like self-aggrandisement…

How about this?

I’ve been in Learning and Development for over 35 years – and I’m still waiting to be found out!

Seriously, I came to L&D late, having been a professional actor for some 12 years. In that time, I only acted for about four of those years; for the rest of that time – as my blog page header says – I was many other things, fruit-picker, postman, delivery driver, barman, audio typist/temp, ‘industrial overload’, professional actor, Office Manager, Business Owner, Trainer, IT Training Manager, Head of Technology Assisted Learning and latterly, Learning Consultant with the CIPD and Accreditation Mentor with the LPI. Meanwhile becoming a husband and father of two.

The common thread here was me trying to earn a living and ‘having a go’ at whatever opportunities presented themselves to achieve and sustain that objective. Along the way, I picked up a raft of transferrable skills and have used some or all of them at different stages of my career.

Resilience, flexibility, adaptability, learning, unlearning, leading, sharing, and yes, even performing.

And all the while, waiting to be found out, to be exposed as unqualified, inexperienced, delusional… Imposter phenomena, anyone?

And yet, here we are. Now I’m at the ‘late career/flexible working’ stage, it feels right to be bringing the skills and knowledge developed over the years into my role now as a professional mentor, supporting others on their career journeys.

There is no such thing now as a job for life. We all need to be able to flex, skill up, reskill, recognise our strengths and our areas for development, and take responsibility for our careers – never more so than now.

Let me invite you to take a reflective look back at your career journey so far. How much of it was intentional, planned, achieved? What impact have you had to date? What skills and personal attributes have got you this far?

And how often have you had to roll with the punches, get derailed, start again? What are you doing to prepare for an uncertain professional job market and the different roles and responsibilities therein? What are your transferrable skills? What’s missing?

Let me know if I can help you answer some of those questions and support your career journey.

#Mentoring #PersonalDevelopment #LnD #HR #ProfessionalMentoring #Skills #Impact

 

 

Reflecting on LearningLive 2024

DALL-E 2024-09-16 A gender-neutral human
speaker addressing an audience of robots.

I've been going back through my notes from last week's Learning & Performance Institute LearningLive annual conference, at which I took the conscious decision to attend as many of the AI-related sessions as I could.

Encouragingly, much of the focus was on the human implications for AI, on making our lives easier by automating our boring, time-consuming and repetitive jobs, particularly where they may already be under-resourced.

For the Learning and Development community, the advice was clear - less content and more context - with the requirement for us to help develop others' digital capability, support the shift from roles to skills and develop personalised learner pathways. In short, re-learn how to learn in the new reality of an AI-enhanced business world and society.

In so doing, the suggestion is that we will create more time and space to develop ourselves, to improve our work, social and family lives, and to develop new skills and interests which 'give us joy' and contribute to the greater human good. A way still to go, then.

I'm starting by exploring and improving my AI prompt skills for specific purposes - once I've worked out what those purposes are. I clearly need to put more work into writing AI image generator prompts.

Full Circle

Photo by Daniel Lloyd Blunk-Fernández on Unsplash

I recently took voluntary redundancy and amicably parted company with my employer.

This, however, was not my first rodeo. In a career of some 40 years, I have taken redundancy three times, for various reasons, none of which reflected fault on my part, but which were business, organisational or personal adjustments. 

The challenge for any individual in these circumstances is to try not to take it personally, nor  consider it as the end of one’s career, but to see beyond the immediate impacts, to look for the opportunities they may present, rather than to catastrophise and assume the worst.

“Easy for you to say”, I hear you say; “you were only part-time - and weren’t you going to retire soon anyway?”

Yes, I was. But I have learned over the years to adopt a more philosophical attitude to these challenges.

 

I recognise here that I write from a more privileged position than many - I was approaching voluntary ‘active retirement’ next year, (and had previously indicated so to my employer); I was already working part-time and flexibly, mostly from home; our children are grown up and our mortgage will be paid off by the end of this year. And I had some potential consultancy work already lined up. Many of my colleagues were not in such a reasonably comfortable place.

So I reflected that maybe it was time for me to step aside, to embrace my ‘active retirement’ as a freelance consultant/coach/mentor, whilst facing into a personally eventful 2025, with significant birthdays, anniversaries and other family celebrations ahead. In so doing, I took myself out of the pool for what my job was to become, hopefully creating the opportunity for other ‘at risk’ colleagues to step in or up, depending on where they were in their careers and personal circumstances - which is what happened.

Now it feels like I’ve come full circle. 

I started my working life as a professional actor. This meant i spent most of my early working years ‘out of work’ (i.e. not acting) but in that time I worked in many other roles - fruit-picker, postman, delivery driver, barman, shop salesperson, follow-spot operator, audio-typist, office manager - with the occasional acting job to keep me on my chosen career path. Acting contracts ranged from 6 weeks to 10 months. And then I’d be back on the job hunt again whilst typing solicitors’ letters, pulling pints or delivering building supplies. It was the original ‘gig’ career.

It was only after I walked away from an acting career which wasn't going anywhere quickly enough, to pursue more security, home and family building, that I realised that along the way I had developed resilience, adaptability and lots of transferable skills. And that I had NOT wasted the first 12 years of my working life - I had been preparing myself for whatever career paths lay ahead.

The story of how I became an IT Trainer, Training Manager and Learning Consultant over the next 30 years is for another time. Sufficient to say that those skills I developed in my early career and my capacity to deploy them and to learn new skills has got me to where I am today.

As we all know, the world of work is changing fast. There is no such thing as a job for life any more. Everyone will face redundancy at some point in their working lives, maybe more than once. Lifelong learning and a preparedness to grasp new skills and opportunities are skills in themselves and it behoves us to embrace them, irrespective of what sectors we may work in.

As I update my own CV, in readiness for another late career flexible working ‘gig’ life, I wonder how you see yourself, your strengths, your successes and what you can do to future-proof your employability. For example, one of the questions - amongst many - I’m asking myself right now is, what skills have I got that AI doesn’t and, if I have any, how can I leverage them over the next few years? And is that even a sensible question?

What questions are you asking yourself about your future of work and how are you preparing yourself for that? Let me know if I can help you with those questions or help you plan your future career strategy. My contact details are in LinkedIn.

Generally Curious

Yesterday, I downloaded Don Taylor's (@DonaldHTaylor) Global Sentiment Survey 2018 report, the results of his annual survey based around one single question, "What do you think will be hot in L&D next year?". It was really interesting to see the "What will be hot?" trends rising, falling or lingering in the rankings over the last four years, with #AI (Artificial Intelligence) being the fastest riser from previous years.

This didn't come as a great surprise to me and, the more I read through the report, the less surprised I was by the rest of the general findings. And I got to wondering why that might be.

The answer seemed to lie in the fact that I keep my eyes open and my ears attuned to what's going on in Learning and Development, Learning Technologies, HR and business, partly because that's my professional arena, but it's also because I am genuinely interested in, and want to know more about this stuff for myself as much as for any current or future clients.

And I'm nosy! But I'm a nosy Generalist. Not just in work, but in life. My 'strapline' in my social media and professional profiles, and indeed, in the title of this blog, is 'I know a little about a lot and a lot about very little'. It's become my Personal Brand. And it reflects my curiosity, my inquisitiveness, my need to maintain and update a personal knowledge bank to enable me to function as a contributing member of the human race, as much as in my professional arena. I read; I watch and listen to the News; I listen to podcasts when I can, I talk to colleagues, friends, acquaintances in social media and in my face-to-face social and professional networks.

So, I wasn't overly surprised about AI being such a high flyer in Don's report, because I've been paying attention. People I follow - in the L&D, HR and Tech arena, but also in the 'real world', the Press, broadcasters, social media, general population and my friends are also seemingly discussing the opportunities and threats of automation and artificial intelligence. I got an Amazon Echo, precisely because I wanted to understand it's capabilities and relevance for both my own professional and personal knowledge.  (So far, it's made shopping easier and it's good source of music and, in my view, it may be artificial, but it ain't yet intelligent!). Now, if someone were to ask me about AI, at least I have an informed opinion. At least I can enter into a discussion about it from a reasonably well-informed position and we can have a good chat about it. Or I can connect them to other people in my network who have more specialist knowledge and experience than I.

And this goes to the heart of my thinking, and my question to you - Are you a Generalist or a Specialist? Do you Look Up from your own safe, 'specialist' position at work or in life, peer over the top of your life/work silo and sniff the air around you? Do you know what's going on in 'the real world'? And are you able to translate that back and connect it into your own life & work and that of others around you? Because nowadays, we need to be able to do just that.

We need to be nosy, inquisitive, curious, interested (and interesting), because we live in interesting times - dynamic, fast-changing, inter-connected, scary times. We need to have the skills to be able to challenge received information, to not accept things at face value, to probe, to explore. We need to build the resilience, attitude and skills that will enable us to flex, adapt, change direction, and/or alter our very behaviours. Again. And again. 

I see many nowadays with a hardening narrowness of view, no peripheral vision, an inability to connect the apparently unconnected, lacking the skills to recognise the impacts of one thing on another and who, consequently, are unable to see and prepare for what may lie ahead. I see it in both my professional and my personal life. And it worries me.

The world is changing. Life is changing. Work is changing. #LookUp!

Fear of Swimming

I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with Caroline Walmsley (@carowalmsley), CEO of Brightwave, last week and we had a wide-ranging conversation about learning, learners, L&D, vendors and the ambiguous spaces betwixt and between them.

We talked about the shift that's happening in learning, the shift that's making learners, trainers and vendors take a good look at themselves and their current and future skill needs. And we wondered why so many of us are finding it difficult to evolve our thinking and our practice to keep up with, and stay ahead of, these changes.  We talked about arrogance and we talked about fear. 

© Copyright David Douglas and licensed for
reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

And I was reminded of learning to swim. I remembered going to swimming lesson at Paisley Baths when I was 8 or 9 years old. I remembered the panic of trying to keep my head above water, to stay in the world above the surface, the belief that I would not be able to breathe if my head went under the surface. The result of that thinking, of course, was that I spent all the time in swimming lessons struggling to 'stay alive' and paid no heed whatsoever to learning the techniques and thereby discovering the fun to be had in swimming.

That fear stayed with me for years. I denied myself the pleasure and the benefits of swimming, despite the many opportunities available to me, well into my late teens. When I did eventually - with the encouragement of friends and colleagues - learn to swim, it was still not with the unbridled joy and abandon that I saw in others. I was staying afloat, my feet were finally 'off the bottom', but I was still essentially expending all my energy in trying to keep my head above water.

And then, at the age of 22, I went to Corfu with my best pal for my first ever foreign holiday. I was determined that I would swim in the Mediterranean. Any Mike brought a snorkle and goggles. That combination of factors finally released me from the fear. At one and the same time, I found I was able to swim AND get my head under the water, whilst still breathing! It was a transformative experience. Not only did I not die, but the world underneath the surface was beautiful. I was surrounded by fish, I was 'flying' over an undersea landscape of forms and shapes and colours I had never imagined. I loved it.

And when I lifted my head back out of the water, I was a quarter of a mile away from the shore. I was a swimmer! (I panicked at that point, but had the sense to stick my head back under the water, and follow the undersea slope back to the beach - learning in action!)

That's what I think those of us engaged in UK Learning PLC need to do. We need to stop struggling to stay alive in the safe world we've always known, to put all our energies into keeping our heads above the water. We need to be brave, to find a way of getting our heads under the surface, to see the world of possibilities open to us, whilst realising that not only can we survive in that space, but we can develop new skills and have fun at the same time. We can operate in more learning environments than we think.

So, feel the fear and do it anyway. Stick your head under the surface, have a good look round and, in the immortal words of 'Dory' from the Disney Pixar film 'Finding Nemo', "just keep swimming, swimming swimming..."

Just the Job!

As my children approach the end of another academic year -Tash, Yr2 at University and Sam starting his A Level exams at 6th Form College - and as Mandy has recently started another new job with a Law Firm in London, I've been reflecting on what getting, having, doing and keeping a job really feels like nowadays.

I've been with my current employer for 7½ years now, was with my previous employer for

8½ years, and the one before that for 2½ years.  Previously, Mandy and I were in business with another couple, running our own moderately successful IT Training company.

But neither of us ever intended to be doing those things.  We met at Christmas 1982, doing panto in Stafford.  We were actors.  That's what we had trained for, had been doing for years (but see below) and intended (hoped) to be doing for the rest of our lives.

If you have read any of my social media bios, you will no doubt have noticed the number of jobs I have had.  This was not from choice, but rather from the choice I made to be an actor.  In a professional career of some 12 years, I probably worked as an actor for about 4.  The rest of the time, I was 'resting', as they say (a crappier euphemism I have yet to see - I wasn't resting, I was bloody surviving!).  These other jobs were fill-in roles, just part of the deal when not acting, to ensure the rent was paid and that I could eat. 

But that's where my previous education, personal & learned capabilities and professional experience paid off.  I could type (SCE 'O' Grade in Audio Typing), so I temped in offices; I could drive (passed my driving test when I was 17), so I drove delivery vans and lorries; I could read and deliver a script, so I did some telesales work (lasted two weeks - hated it!).  Bottom line, I managed to keep the wolf from the door because I had some life skills and had learned some stuff along the way to enable me to develop further.  I took this to be the norm and it was at a time when jobs like that were many and available.

However, when Mandy and I (still actors) became a couple and later married, this situation was no longer tenable.  We both took on more structured, permanent roles, found ourselves working with what we now call 'information and learning technologies', but back then we called 'computers', 'word-processors', 'spreadsheets' and 'computer-based training' - and the rest, as they say, is history...

But the landscape's changed now.  I've been lucky to keep my jobs until I was ready to move on (except being made redundant once, 16 years ago), but  in the last two years Mandy's been made redundant once, had to leave her next position due to a clash of understanding about organisational culture and, most recently, her last contract was unexpectedly terminated early and at very short notice.  This is not a reflection on her skills or abilities, but the knife-edge, short-termist economics stalking the business world today. Many of our friends and colleagues have found themselves in the same situation and not always been lucky enough to find other work!

I'd suggest that NO-ONE can rely on a job for life any more.  It seems to me that no long-term career planning is  possible - that we are ALL actors, moving from one job to another, having to prove ourselves time and again to yet another numpty (I had another word lined up here, but good taste prevailed) and starting afresh with new colleagues, work practices, rules, values etc.  In itself, this is no bad thing - much learning and growing to be had and done - but it's the longueurs in between, often of several months or even years, while the coffers slowly empty and the debts begin to mount that really take their toll.

So, as the children (young adults) start to look at further education and career-wards beyond that, what lessons have we learned from this that we can share with them?  What challenges have they got ahead that are the same as - or are very different from - our challenges? What does the world of work look like for Graduates and young people today?

The UK Guardian newspaper reported only last week that a UN Agency, The International Labour Office International Labour Organisation said that young people across the world continue to be almost three times more likely than adults to be unemployed. There are 979,000 unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK, after a 20,000 rise in the three months to February The Guardian 

How can we help prepare our young people to survive in this environment? 

I'd suggest that there are some essential 'life' skills required nowadays, over and above the academic. When I needed them, I relied on my communication skills, my typing skills and the fact that I could drive to keep me in work. Today, I would add to/change those skills, thus: articulacy and good verbal/conversational skills (a key differentiator in my opinion), good written and digital communication skills, driving, curiosity, flexibility, tenacity - and patience.  All these to underpin any other skills they may have or develop.

I'd love to grow that list to pass it on to our young people, maybe with some resource links to assist them.  What other essential skills would you suggest to enable them to enter the world of work with the best fighting chance?