Training Provider Blog 

  With the new gold rush toward AI are you chasing the gold or selling the shovels? History tells us the shovel sellers did a brilliant piece of rock solid (pardon the pun) business, while a handful of gold prospectors hit the big time, while most gold prospectors were left broke and disillusioned.

In high‑pressure, male‑dominated environments conversations about wellbeing often focus on safety, fatigue and operational risk. But there’s a quieter, often overlooked factor influencing performance, retention and team dynamics, Menopause and Midlife Wellbeing. For many organisations, this isn’t yet seen as a business issue…..but it is one. Although many have yet to address this as a business issue, its impact is evident across sites and project teams.

Excel had its 40th birthday last year. It is the most used software (outside of Outlook) and some teams live in Excel day in day out. In fact looking up the statistics Microsoft say there are over a billion users of Excel. I have personally been delivering Excel training for over 30 years and seen it change from Excel 4 – single sheet files to its current form. 

For over 30 years we have been saving files in shared drives on networks, and more recently many people have moved to cloud filing. Although cloud filing is different technology for some reason, it is being treated the same. Who doesn’t love to create a little yellow folder!

I have been both delivering corporate training and performing comedy for over 20 years – and in some ways these two parallel careers have little in common.  For example I’ve never opened a comedy gig by sharing my learning objectives for the session. I’ve also never told a joke about my mother-in-law in a leadership workshop. Actually, come to think of it, I might have done... Most of the time though, what you say in comedy is not appropriate for training and vice versa.

A few years ago, I was asked to train a group of PhD hires at an investment bank. We had three whole days to explore communication, impact and personal brand.  The training manager scheduled a call a week or so before the programme and explained that one particular participant (let’s call him Eric) was really struggling with communication. Eric was technically brilliant, however his team had flagged his communication skills as a real area for development.