Did You Know I Played for Chelsea...?

OK, so the title of this blog may not be entirely accurate. Admittedly I did used to play football, but the local pub team Sunday league style of play was a little different to that of the higher echelons of the sport. I also wouldn't qualify to be a professional footballer as I don't earn enough money to bail out Greece and I've never cheated on my wife with:

1. a friends missus,
2. a relative's partner
3. a reality TV "celebrity"
4. a work acquaintance
5. a complete stranger
6. a friend
7. any/all of the above

(As with most elearning, the last option's the right one, just in case you were wondering...).

 

So why the weird blog title? It's because last week, Chelsea (that centre of excellence for high moral values) appointed a new manager in Andre Villas-Boas. Apparently he's their 7th manager in the last 7 years, although it's a little difficult to keep track. That's the sort of statistic that often leads to such comments as "that could only happen in football", or "the owner's obviously got more money than sense".
The 2nd comment is quite possibly correct in this case, but I'm now living proof that the 1st comment is actually wrong...
Last week, I started reporting to my new manager - my 7th in 7 years too. I can however out-do Chelsea in that my new manager is my 4th in a year.
Now this should raise a few questions in anyone's mind, some of which I will now try to answer:-

1. No, I'm not that difficult to work with :-)
2. No, I haven't bumped/scared any of my previous managers off. One did move to the US and another to Australia, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't anything to do with me...
3. Yes, I am in the same team but -
4. No, I haven't stayed in the same department (L&D, IT, Operational Services)
5. Yes, it does plant a small seed of doubt that the company may be a little unsure of where to put us...;-)
6. Yes, it does make it more difficult to develop and maintain a great working relationship with your manager.
7. Yes, I have continued to do my job well, irrespective of the department I'm in or the manager I have.

It's the last three answers that I want to look at in a little more detail though.
I think the company may be a little unsure of where the team (both of us) fit, but to be honest I don't actually feel that's all that important. We have a clear remit in what we do - to provide training (in whatever form) predominently for the company's in-house systems, but also for standard software. Whilst we have different areas of expertise and ways of doing things, together we've built a solid team that is always in demand by our customers. There have been plusses and minuses of working in each of the departments where we've been, but have the customers been concerned about that? No. As long as they get the training that best fits their need, they don't care where we sit.
So how about the one-2-one relationships with the multitude of managers. Hasn't the frequent changes made things more difficult in terms of consistency, personal development etc? Quite possibly, yes.
With any new colleague, there will always be an initial period of getting to know eachother, your likes/dislikes, ways of working etc. With a new manager you also need to throw in your joint expectations of how things are going to work. There's also the small fact that in each case, the 'new' manager wasn't new to the company and that we therefore already knew eachother.
Some consistency to build a working relationship is usually going to be a good thing, and having a manager who knows the effect that personal development can have on morale is crucial. But do you need a manager to be there all the time? No. For me, the ideal manager is one who's there when you need them, and not there when you don't. I'm generally considered to be a grown-up (most of the time) and can work equally well with others or alone.
So what are my first impressions of number 7? Well, I've known him for several years; we've always got on really well; we're having a get together later today / this evening with the other 2 teams he manages; and he's already asked where we want to take our professional development, and how he can help achieve those goals...
Pretty positive then.
And I'm looking forward to him being in the post for much longer than Mr Villas-Boas.....

PS - just in case you were wondering, I don't support Chelsea...:-))

A Sense of Community

Last week I went to a funeral. It’s not a particularly unusual thing to do, and as you get older it unfortunately becomes more painfully frequent. This particular one was the funeral of Caty Taylor – my Dad’s aunt and therefore (I think) my Great Aunt. She was 85 when she died and had led a very full and interesting life – a life that a short, elearning-related blog post could never do justice to, but please stick with it.

She was born in Greece in 1926 and grew up partly there and in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. And this is the first of many events, decisions and connections that eventually led to me being related to her. The biggest of these events was undoubtedly World War 2, and the Allies decision to pursue the German forces through North Africa. My Dad’s Uncle Norman was serving with the British Army there, which directly led to him meeting this young, beautiful Greek girl in Egypt. It’s difficult to imagine how hard this must have been, with Caty’s parents probably being none too keen on their daughter dating a foreign soldier who was unlikely to be around for very long. But this must have been nothing compared to the difficult and brave decision Caty then took – to stay with this soldier and return to England with him.

Back in London, they married and eventually had kids – Marion and Michael – but their initial arrival caused quite a stir amongst Norman’s (and therefore my Dad’s) friends and family. To say that the majority of them were less than welcoming to this young Greek girl, who only had a basic grasp of English, would be a pretty accurate statement. In fact, my Dad and my Grandad were (I’m extremely proud to say) 2 of the only ones to welcome her with open arms. They included her in whatever they did, and Caty became a little bit of a surrogate sister to my Dad – their ages were only 5 years apart after all.

When my Mum and Dad met in the early 50’s and subsequently got married in 1956, the first place they lived together was in the flat on the top level of Norman and Caty’s house in Shepherd’s Bush. And it was from here that the community spirit engendered particularly by Caty’s outgoing nature, and her desire to make others feel included in the way she had been by my Dad and Grandad, really started to grow. She went out of her way to make sure friends and neighbours on their street were doing OK, that they felt able to call round for a chat whenever they wanted. She would usually cook for them – a side of her I remember well, as whenever we visited we always left feeling like we’d have no need to eat for the next couple of days. Caty also loved to visit the local shops, including all the charity shops – another way that she was able to give back to the community that had welcomed her more than some members of her new family had.

And it’s this sense of community that was apparent at her funeral last week. Several of the people there (I don’t want to call them mourners as, whilst we are all so sad to have lost her, our lives were richer for having known her) were more than just friends. They were part of her network; her community; her group of friends that were part of a community from which no-one was excluded.

I think this is something that up until a few years ago had been gradually disappearing from ‘normal’ life. As people became more wrapped up with what they could do from the comfort of their own home or office, they forgot that they had neighbours or friends with whom they didn’t seem to talk any more. I’m as bad as anyone else at this and still only tend to exchange small-talk with my closet neighbours, or only see some of my closest friends very infrequently. But what do millions of people now do daily – they join and interact with a multitude of online communities, and in doing so can create a similar sense of inclusion with people that, ordinarily, they would never have conversed with.

So that’s something that I’m going to try changing. I’m going to keep increasing my involvement with the online communities I’m already a part of, but I’m also going to keep Caty’s lifetime of experiences in mind by trying to become more involved with local, offline communities. It’s easy to say, trickier to do, but with a little determination, is far from impossible.

And I’m always going to be thinking of Caty when I think of these communities. Caty Taylor – my truly Great Aunt.

Regular Blogging...?

OK, so it's been about 4 months since I set this blog up and I'm only just getting around to writing my second post. I've been busy... and a little forgetful.
But today has been pretty momentous in that my youngest has started school, and (hopefully) started learning even more than what he has so far. His excitement at becoming a 'big boy' (no sniggering at the back please), in his school uniform which includes his "boring trousers", was obvious, and I'm glad to report that he started as he means to go on:-
By trying to climb the tree outside the assembly hall before we'd even been let into the school....

But this has really made me think again about the environment he's going to be learning in. My daughter's at the same school and has just started year 3, and I still remember the amazement I felt on first going into her reception year classroom. There was a large smartboard, a ceiling projector and a couple of PCs in every room. I'm not sure what I had expected to find, but seeing as the last time I'd been in a school classroom was a long while back, I wouldn't have been surprised to see a chalk-dust ridden blackboard.

But have either of my kids been surprised to see such technology? No, of course they haven't, in the same way that I wasn't surprised to see a dusty old blackboard and graffiti-etched desks on my first day at school back in the late 1800's.

So what does this have to do with what I set out to write about in my initial post - the state of e-learning in the corporate environment. Well there are several things which bug me and which I hope to address in subsequent posts. But one item that often recurs is an underlying attitude in relation to e-learning, often exhibited by L&D and IT towards users and learners - i.e. their customers. There sometimes seems to be an assumption that any new technology or new, interactive way of learning online simply won't be understood by the learners. They assume that the learner, when presented with such new-fangled ideas and tools will simply give up or break something or come running back to them, begging them to give them back their books and text-heavy 'traditional e-learning courses'.
I understand that there will sometimes be problems with the corporate infrastructure or with ongoing support for certain tech. But a lot of the time I feel that it's too easy not to move forward and try new things, using the excuse that too much support would be required by the users as they just wouldn't be able to cope.

I do feel that certain areas of an organisation can find it hard to get to grips with learning in new ways, whilst others just take it in their stride.

Using the example of my kids going into their new classrooms, I don't think it's the learners who struggle to adapt......

Welcome to My Blog

Hello.
Well, I've been using Twitter for a while now so I thought it was about time I had a go at blogging. As I work in training/learning/elearning, I'm going to concentrate around those areas and explain my thoughts on them.
I'm a fan of elearning when it's done well and had some thought put into it, but I can't stand it when the same old drivel gets churned out and the poor users are expected to learn something from it.
Will this blog put the world to rights? Er....no.
Will it contain my perspective on elearning in the real world? Yes.
Will it be written in a serious, humourless way? God, I hope not.