When we started The Development Company in 1994, five day residential courses were the ‘norm’. We could spend whole days driving or travelling to a course to stay in a hotel or a conference centre, and then a shorter last day to accommodate for the journey home. Looking back, that is potentially a huge trauma […]

This is my second blog on why we think virtual facilitation is the future. These are the words of our learners, clients, and sponsors. We consistently find that there are far more positive effects of virtual training than there are negative effects. In this blog, my focus is on how team bonding is enhanced as […]

Like most training organisations, we changed our delivery mode to virtual facilitation over the past year. We were nervous to start with, which was natural, considering we’ve worked offline for 90% of the time in 26 years in business. What is interesting, however, is the positive effects of virtual training. Having spent time reviewing the […]

Covid-19 Lockdown As the Covid-19 pandemic shook the world, it caused implications for us all and our lives have changed like never before. The beginning of the lockdown was chaos! With people rushing to the supermarkets to panic buy, we saw food shortages and people arguing over the last pack of toilet rolls! Schools and […]

The internet today is filled with professionals who claim to have a recipe for a successful, deadline-crushing workday. And usually, they’re these idyllic daily routines and practices riddled with juggling countless productivity apps. However, sometimes the simplest techniques can take us the farthest. Time blocking is one of them – an effective, easy to use […]

What is Coaching? When people hear the word “Coach” or “Coaching” they usually think of sport. That can often cause confusion as many so-called sports coaches are actually sports trainers. So people can see coaching as training people with skills to make them better at doing something – which would be an incorrect definition. Coaching […]

Is There A Conflict Between Coaching and HR? By Annette Miller (Annette is an HR professional who recently completed her Certificate in Coaching with The Development Company) Introduction It would be a natural assumption to think that most of the qualities that an HR business partner learns and uses every day would easily lend themselves […]

Management strategies need to be refocused. Technology is everywhere, and it’s undoubtedly reshaped our day-to-day lives. The past two decades have shown how technology has rapidly taken over the world—so much so, that World Finance reported that all of the fastest-growing industries in the world are either reliant or closely related to technology. Advances in modern technology […]

Guest blogger, Karen Chamberlain, explains how you can become even more awesome than you already are! As a self-employed business owner for over 7 years, I recognise it’s important to stay focused, positive, resilient and to be self-motivated. My ability to do this, and to do this well most of the time, strengthens over time; […]

Guest blogger, JenVB, explores here the role of elearning as part of your organisational learning strategy. Now that so much information is available online, creating interactive knowledge based online courses is much more cost and time effective than paying people to travel to a fixed location and then listen to a presenter read out Powerpoint […]