Consultancy Skills for Training and Development Professionals

With Consultancy Skills for Training and Development Professionals has been designed for you if your role is in training and development and involves influencing others with credible solutions. Perhaps you are a consultant, HR business partner or a training manager and you wish to develop your consultancy skills to raise your profile.

This competency development programme will enable you to engage in activities that are specifically focused upon developing the competencies required of training and development consultants.

Duration 3 days.

Who Will Benefit?

Organisations are constantly facing the need to change. Increasingly our customers are expecting learning and development consultants to respond quickly with practical, portable, accessible, efficient and creative solutions that are cost effective and aligned to the needs of the business.

This Consultancy Skills for Training and Development Professionals course will ensure you develop the confidence to work with stakeholders at all levels.

We will provide you with an end to end process to ensure efficiency in your consulting practice  and enable you to develop the skills relevant to engage stakeholders and enhance each stage of the process.

Our main objective is to enable training consultants and learning and development specialists to raise their profile. We know you will enhance your influencing skills and make a measurable difference within the organisation by providing a valuable, effective consultancy service. A service that distinguishes between the presenting problem and the underlying problem, providing a solution for the actual business problem the customer is experiencing.

A Terrific Testimonial

Learning Technologies

During the day we will go on a treasure hunt to find and evaluate a range of Apps and tools to engage learners, push learning, and build collaboration. Please bring your mobile phone, tablet or laptop along to the session to enable you to experiment with the treasure hunt.

Internal training consultants will develop the skills to:

• Contract with the client – structure the contracting meeting
• Identify strategies for engagement
• Select and apply a consultancy style that builds rapport
• Demonstrate commercial awareness
• Analyse data on a number of levels
• Identify organisational data that is relevant to the problem and the solution
• Link solutions to commercial realities
• Be aware of the organisational politics, and cultural characteristics that influence solutions
• Gather data to measure performance outcomes
• Focus on analytical and proactive thinking to enable measurable solutions interact with colleagues and clients alike, developing professional relationships
• Identify flexible and cost effective approaches to learning
• Ensure return on investment
• Develop strategies for marketing your consultancy or in house service

Consultancy Skills For Training and Development Professionals

What is the scope of my product or service?

• Consultancy defining the scope of your service. Identifying business benefits
• identifying growth opportunities to develop your service
• Promoting services choosing channels to market
• Identifying the issues that impact the way you work with line managers
• People, Politics and Potential influences on in each part of the consulting process

Working Smarter – Modern Learning Methods

• Increasing value from a training budget
• Belende learning alternatives to traditional classroom methods of delivery
• Avoiding the conspiracy of convenience by providing minimal learning solutions
• Learning battle cards activity access to a range of instructional ideas
• Let’s innovate treasure hunt activity – applications that support modern workplace learning
• Evaluating potential and pitfalls among the treasure

The Consulting Process & Contracting

• Contract with the client – structure the contracting meeting
• Identifying information needs and the scope of service
• Assessing the balance of responsibility
• Communicating understanding of the problem
• Identifying what you want from the client
• Seeking feedback and securing permission to act
• Process, People and Performance identifying measures of success
• Proposition design: identifying the key factors that will make a solution compelling for a client.
• Diagnosis: recognising states of readiness for the change solution proposed
• Understanding resistance
• Overcoming client objections and concerns
• Managing expectations Reporting – what will be measured and how will results be communicated

Analysis & Diagnosis

This session explores a range of consulting tools and techniques to gather, analyse and interpret data, generate options and move towards potential solutions

• Brinkerhoff Model Start with the end in mind
• Data collection – Is / Is Not Analysis and problem solving
• 5 Whys
• Fishbone Technique
• Pareto Analysis
• SWOT
• SAND
• Weighted Matrix
• Action Planning interventions to ensure you deliver timely and comprehensive solutions

Honing Consultancy Skills

All consulting projects require inputs from other people – internal consultants achieve through people. Effective training consultants encourage, motivate, persuade, influence, involve, excite and empower others to contribute. Since internal consultants rarely have line manager authority this requires a special set of skills.  Recognising that not everyone will be on your side from the beginning and developing ways to work with allies, opponents, champions and adversaries.

• Influencing and negotiating skills – you are more likely to get what you need if people want to give it to you; this session provides participants with powerful influencing techniques
• Cialdini’s 6 key influencing tactics
• Facilitating meetings
• Facilitation tools
• Structuring, questioning
• Encouraging participation
• Communicating with internal clients – frequency, channels, content – managing expectations and delivering bad news

Making Recommendations

• Selling solutions with the spin cycle
• Presenting Recommendations
• Anticipating and Overcoming Resistance
• Specifying Support Needs
• Gaining Commitment Barriers to change recognising them and making recommendations to overcome them. Supporting  the transition to modern learning

You will enjoy: Little value from big wigs and stinking thinking (exactly the sort of practice this course will teach you to avoid)

Take a look at Flexible Learning

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