For the last few months I have been working with a business team in my company responsible for their cross-specialisation as part of a cultural transformation change initiative. When I first started working with them, the team only had two subject matter experts who had been in the organisation for some years and knew all […]
Take Control of Your Own Professional Development
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reflection lately over my professional life and overall, I have been quite lucky to have been given lots of experiences across a wide range of industries. It’s made me the person I am today but now in my early 40s, I sit and think, “what’s next on […]
Job Seeker Alarm Bells
I’m convinced that when we look for work through the normal means of recruiters and online job boards, we go about it the wrong way. This shouldn’t be the way to find work because it’s a waste of energy for everyone. Over many years in the workforce, I have been and seen many instances where […]
Right Now! CRM In the Cloud…
I’m not endorsing this product nor paid to write about it – I’m simply blogging my own views. Today we had a demonstration of a new product implemented in our organisation and I was impressed. We were told that it was an Oracle product and having had experience with Oracle in the past (namely their […]
Can Someone Turn Off Email, Please?
(I’m not endorsing any product mentioned here today – purely my own views) My usual Sunday morning routine is to get up nice and early, make myself a cup of tea and a bowl of cereal and then sit quietly at the dining room table surfing through my tweets on my iPhone. This morning I […]
You say Tomato and I say Tomatoe…
Yesterday started well. Any day when I’m working from home to catch up with my design and development work (as my time at work is taken up by unproductive meetings and various interruptions) is good. However this feeling was short-lived when I received a phone call from one of the business analysts whom I’m working […]
Trials and Tribulations with the Overhead Projector
I’m enjoying reading Donald Clark’s Plan B blog where he covers various instructional tools over the years. Last night, I read his post on, “Overhead Projectors: The Trapezoid of Boredom” and a flood of wonderful memories of my early days in Learning and Development. I had a love/hate relationship with these babies. The grey, heavy […]
Personal Knowledge Management Workshop through Social Learning Centre UK
In September, I participated in the PKM Personal Knowledge Management Workshop through the Social Learning Centre, UK. On the site above, it defined Personal Knowledge Management as a “set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world & work more effectively.” The online workshop was moderated by Harold Jarche who provided […]
My Top 10 Tools for Learning
Everyone’s eagerly awaiting for Jane Hart from the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies to publish her Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012 (see 2011’s list here) and voting will close soon. I stumbled upon this list and the heavens opened, the bright light shone down and illuminated my darkened mind for the first time. This was exactly […]
A Turbulent Mind
Lately I’ve had a turbulent mind. At the LearnX Conference a few weeks ago, it was described as being in ‘hyper-attention’ but I believe that this not the right definition for my state. Wikipedia describes hyper attention as a “cognitive style due to a generational shift in youngsters, therefore, having a short attention span, needing […]
Different Perspectives of Learning by all the Players
This year has been an immense journey of personal and professional development for me. Coupled with a challenging project environment which saw me part of a Learning and Development team of 11 people on a cultural transformation program that had to rapidly develop learning solutions within serious time constraints, we were put through an organisational restructure. The […]
4 Things I Learned at LearnX
Read the LearnX story by clicking on the Storify icon. This year has been a massive personal learning journey for me. I have decided that my ‘old world’ thinking in learning and development is not serving its purpose anymore and I need to step out of my comfort zone of the learning and development field […]
Alert! Not all Gen Y’s are Social Media Experts
Last Wednesday night I was invited to speak to a District Rotaract meeting. Rotaract is a not-for-profit service community affiliated with Rotary for 18-30 year olds. Many years ago, I was a member of the Canberra South Rotaract Club and I remember that time fondly because I made friends in a town away from home, […]
Game On! Learning About Gamification on a MOOC
Some time ago I attended a Personal Learning Conference in Melbourne that was conducted jointly through Deakin University and the University of Aveiro Portugal. I was the “odd man out” being the only one from corporate attending a conference in a sea of academics – but I didn’t mind. In fact, that conference turned out […]
Reflections of TedX 2012 Future Leadership Event in Melbourne
I’m glad to say that I’m not a Ted virgin anymore. Sometimes I think that I’m “behind the 8-ball” with a lot of things – I simply don’t jump on the bandwagon with everyone else. I’m the one who watches other people jump over each other to get onboard that wagon, watch it squeak past me and if the wheels or people dont […]
Can You Get Rid of Your To Do List?
We lead busy lives. So busy that many of us have ‘to do’ lists whether they are written on paper or on an application on your iPhone or iPad so when something unexpected comes up in our lives, the ‘to do’ list gets thrown out the window – or it grows! Last week, an Armani dressed surgeon […]
Meeting my Online Community Service Network Face-to-Face for the First Time
For those of you who know me, I have a personal blog and a professional blog and decided a long time ago to keep them both separated. After all, do you really want to learn of my interests and ramblings that aren’t related to learning? Do you really want to know about my community service […]
What I Learned about Social Learning came from….Knitters
Many of us have interests and hobbies that make us use our hands and inspire creativity and satisfaction from having made something from scratch. Whether it’s cooking, woodwork or painting, there’s a feeling that cannot be replicated by any office job. For me, it’s knitting. I’ve been knitting for over 35 years having started the […]
An Old Coaching Framework Comes Good In a New World…Part 3
Late last week I visited the team that I coached the Job Instruction technique to observe them in practice. It was the first time the subject matter expert coaches were to coach their team members on the new processes (after having practiced it amongst themselves). I kept an open mind about what was going to […]
Acting Like a Producer for a Day
Today I took the opportunity to work from home which I relish. If I could do this more often, I would. You see, I’m an early bird. I don’t think twice about getting up at 5am and starting work if it means I finish early and do the things I want to do. So today, […]