Or not.
I was graciously asked to co-present a session at the CIPD L&D show a couple of weeks ago with the excellent Stella O’Neill. The session was a pure co-delivery; Stella did a bit, I did a bit, Stella did a bit, etc. Expertly chaired by Julie Drybrough, there was plenty of time for an excellent Q&A session afterwards. The topic was Doing More with Less; L&D on a budget.
One question was popular in the room – what are your top tips for starting and L&D team on a budget?
The question was amplified via Twitter and some of the responses are below:
@TowardsMaturity be clear about which roles you need for the long term not just to meet today’s demands #cipdldshow
— Sukhvinder Pabial (@sukhpabial) May 12, 2016
@TowardsMaturity see the whole organisation as the L&D team. There will be enthusiasts and champions out there, help them develop L&D skills
— Jonathan Marshall (@LearningFCO) May 12, 2016
@fuchsia_blue @AndrewJacobsLD find ways of sharing learning content and encourage any who can to blog, disseminate learning internally
— Amanda (@Pontecarloblue) May 12, 2016
@TowardsMaturity don’t just do what you think L&D should do find out the business problems & look at how you can add value quickly
— Paul Duxbury (@PaulDuxbury) May 12, 2016
My intention had been to take the question, tell everyone how to do it and sit back with a neat blog post of 500 words again. But this post isn’t.
As I walked out the session I had a few people come up to me and comment on it and how it helped. And then someone who’d been at the session I ran last year came up to me. Anne Parker told me how she’d gone back to her business and re-designed their offer based on the principles that I’ve been talking about for a while.
Blown away by such positive feedback, I realised that it wasn’t for me to rattle out more content – it’s about the L&D community engaging with the topic and producing the top tips for themselves. I’ve done this before in a blog post about why people use twitter and I want to do the same thing again.
In the comments, tell me your top tips for L&D on a budget. It can be anything you think would help people develop a lower cost/higher value offer and no tip is too small. As Jane Bozarth said earlier today:
Everybody’s ideas are obvious to them, but not to others: Why it’s important to #showyourwork https://t.co/76LarXVOwn ht @bertvries
— Jane Bozarth (@JaneBozarth) May 28, 2016
Show your work and share your top tips!
Lost and Desperate 
Andrew you really need to change your blog photo. You look so different now. Better different.
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Have a good, hard, creative look at the people, tools and tech your business is already using and try to leverage and/or tweak them to support your business colleagues’ learning needs. Try them out with pilot groups who are up for trying something new.
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I value your thoughts on doing stuff for nowt, particularly as I work for an organisation that has budget.
Some thoughts:
1. Do proper TNA. Chances are what people are asking for isn’t training or is training but not what they’re presenting with.
2. Read research. Don’t rely on consultancy produced stuff, it’s rarely if ever in depth enough, although it can give an initial sense. And not white papers either, they’re typically marketing pieces masquerading as research. If you don’t know how to read academic studies then learn how to – you’re an education professional after all.
3. Look for digital alternatives. There’s great stuff emerging. (See Andrews feed from today for an interesting looking Google digital marketing course).
4. Be critical. Be prepared to question everything, including your own judgements (I do more u-turns than David Cameron).
I’m looking forward to seeing other comments here.
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One thing I almost never hear spoken of in this space is reducing the “cost of sales”. Whether you resource internally or externally the time and effort taken to get to the point where you can deliver (even at a distance) a meaningful solution is a cost. Reduce that cost and you can create greater value. For (good) external consultants, reduce their cost of sales and they can provide you with greater discretionary effort.
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There are so many free online resources. Surely we could make better use of these (e.g. https://entrepreneurs.maqtoob.com/the-37-best-websites-to-learn-something-new-895e2cb0cad4#.hs361573w)? Loving the comments above – a great crowdsourced collection of ideas. Nice one! Dyfrig
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