Learning & Development Business Partner - North East

Learning & Development Business Partner - North East Home Based, Areas covered: Felling, Northumberland, County Durham, Tyne & Wear, Teeside, and North Yorkshire.

With extensive experience of best practice L&D delivery solutions, you are ready to develop your career in a business that will encourage your insight and input, welcome your ideas and act on them. That business is AkzoNobel. Home to the Dulux Super Brand and world class products including Sikkens, Cuprinol and Polycell, we are looking for a senior level L&D professional to lead and manage the deployment of our UK L&D strategy. This is a high profile role within our business, part of a new global L&D operating model combining global aligned programs with local bespoke initiatives.
We operate in a number of important market segments ranging from buildings and infrastructure to transport, industrial and consumer goods. We’re also the sector leader in sustainability and number one in the renowned Dow Jones Sustainability Index. We are also named amongst the Top Employers in the UK.  You can’t make a great impact like this without having great people. We want to be the best – to use our leading market positions to deliver a leading performance – and for that, we need the best.  Is that you?
As the Learning & Development Business Partner for the North East you will provide high level Account Manager consultation support for this region. Working alongside senior local HR Business Partners you will be responsible for developing and implementing L&D strategic plans for each business.  You will analyse skill gaps, gain insight of key development needs and challenges and formulate plans to improve internal capability, people engagement and performance.  As the Subject Matter Expert on a country-wide basis for Commercial L&D Capability, you will partner with global and local commercial excellence teams to provide high level L&D consultation to drive people capability within UK Commercial functions. 

Degree qualified (or equivalent experience) you will have proven high level experience in L&D strategy at senior level and be a competent high level facilitator.  Ideally a CIPD (or equivalent) member with a recognised coaching qualification would be an advantage. You will be commercially astute, results focussed and a team player.  You will champion and drive the transition to a learning culture and self-managed development.  You will be effective at analysing needs and devising cohesive solutions, great at motivating and engaging diverse audiences and be a skilled influencer.

At AkzoNobel, we believe we can only grow our business as fast as we grow our people, so if you want to be L&D Business Partner in a business that will invest in you and give you the opportunity to develop please apply below.

AkzoNobel. Where your ideas go far.

LocationHome Based, Areas covered: Felling, Northumberland, County Durham, Tyne & Wear, Teeside, and North Yorkshire.SalaryCompetitive Salary & Benefits - up to 10% company bonus, company car, 25 days annual leave, pension, BUPA health insurance, 50% discount on our products.DurationPermanent full timeReference1400063EContact NameN/A

With extensive experience of best practice L&D delivery solutions, you are ready to develop your career in a business that will encourage your insight and input, welcome your ideas and act on them. That business is AkzoNobel. Home to the Dulux Super Brand and world class products including Sikkens, Cuprinol and Polycell, we are looking for a senior level L&D professional to lead and manage the deployment of our UK L&D strategy. This is a high profile role within our business, part of a new global L&D operating model combining global aligned programs with local bespoke initiatives.
We operate in a number of important market segments ranging from buildings and infrastructure to transport, industrial and consumer goods. We’re also the sector leader in sustainability and number one in the renowned Dow Jones Sustainability Index. We are also named amongst the Top Employers in the UK.  You can’t make a great impact like this without having great people. We want to be the best – to use our leading market positions to deliver a leading performance – and for that, we need the best.  Is that you?
As the Learning & Development Business Partner for the North East you will provide high level Account Manager consultation support for this region. Working alongside senior local HR Business Partners you will be responsible for developing and implementing L&D strategic plans for each business.  You will analyse skill gaps, gain insight of key development needs and challenges and formulate plans to improve internal capability, people engagement and performance.  As the Subject Matter Expert on a country-wide basis for Commercial L&D Capability, you will partner with global and local commercial excellence teams to provide high level L&D consultation to drive people capability within UK Commercial functions. 

Degree qualified (or equivalent experience) you will have proven high level experience in L&D strategy at senior level and be a competent high level facilitator.  Ideally a CIPD (or equivalent) member with a recognised coaching qualification would be an advantage. You will be commercially astute, results focussed and a team player.  You will champion and drive the transition to a learning culture and self-managed development.  You will be effective at analysing needs and devising cohesive solutions, great at motivating and engaging diverse audiences and be a skilled influencer.

At AkzoNobel, we believe we can only grow our business as fast as we grow our people, so if you want to be L&D Business Partner in a business that will invest in you and give you the opportunity to develop please apply below.

AkzoNobel. Where your ideas go far.

Apply now

View the original article here

DrupalCampBrighton does the business!

I attended DrupalCampBrighton today for their Business Day, the first day of a three day Drupal extravaganza! LEO were sponsoring the business day which I was really pleased about, we do a fair amount of Drupal work and it’s great to both give something back to the open source community and to get involved in supporting local events. The event was attended by about 60 people at Brighton Media Centre, with the rest of the weekend focussed on more developer-oriented stuff. Today was all about case studies and keynotes though, a bit more at my level! It was a really great event and I came away enthused and energised for all things open source. A great way to end the week!

Before continuing, thanks to all the organisers for putting this on. It’s no small feat putting together an event like this. On Saturday and Sunday there are three speaker streams plus all-day developer sprints. It’s a hugely impressive setup, supported by a team of 8 staff volunteering their time and 15 local sponsors. Well done to one and all for a superb event!

The day started with Jeffrey “Jam” McGuire from Acquia (@HornCologne), a man with the rather natty job title of Open Source Evangelist and a pretty awesome handlebar moustache to boot. Jam gave a half hour keynote that was the best intro to open source I’ve seen in years, although he was certainly preaching to the converted with this crowd. More interesting was his focus on how open source is a driver for business and government transformation. He recalled a conversation with the UK Cabinet Office in which they noted that before mandating open source in government procurements, the map of UK government software spend was centred on the area between Reading and London where Microsoft, Oracle, IBM etc have their UK presence. Since open source that map has blossomed out across the entire country with spending going to SMEs nationwide who can deliver mature and robust open source solutions to government at a fraction of the price. Crucially, that doesn’t only support SMEs but keeps money in the UK instead of going off to some Redmond bank account.

@dc_brighton @HornCologne open source is free as in speech, but “free as in puppy” too. Love that line. Nurture. Maintain. #drupalbizday

— Mark Aberdour (@maberdour) January 16, 2015

I often have to explain to clients that open source is zero license but not free. No software is free, it always has a cost of ownership in setup, support, updates and maintenance, whatever the license type. Jam used the analogy “free as in puppy”, it’s the first time I heard the line but it sums it up perfectly, you need to nurture, grow and look after your open source implementation. I’ll be borrowing that line myself from now on!

Lizzie Hodgson (@lizziehodgson01), who was also compere for the day, then took the stage to talk about the Drupal community. I only really dabble in the fringes of this community so it was interesting to hear about the scale and characteristics of the Drupal community.

Just polishing my cheeky little @dc_brighton “power of #drupal community” #drupalbizday talk – Jan 16 #Brighton pic.twitter.com/O3YxZDc09i — Lizzie Hodgson (@lizziehodgson01) January 11, 2015

Lizzie’s presentation was very insightful and it struck me just how similar the Drupal and Moodle communities are. Both over 1 million community members from 200+ countries, translating the software into 100+ languages, dorm-room founders approximately 14 years ago, annual national conferences the world over, local user groups, the list goes on. These two open source ecosystems have travelled very similar paths over the past decade. Both products were once the young disruptors but are now the juggernauts in their respective spaces, with young upstarts snapping at their own heels. This maturity and strength in the community and ecosystem is a huge advantage, of course. Lizzie also played a great video clip from Cancer Research UK about how they view Drupalcamp as a vital learning and development event for their in-house development team.

Richard Jones from iKOS was up next talking about the e-commerce website they built for retailer Lush. It was a great case study and had good technical detail, but the takeaway for me was how Lush formed a central team called Lush Digital to take digital transformation through every aspect of their business, almost like a microcosm of Government Digital Services who were up shortly. There’s a theme here, and in any large and complex organisation whether a retail chain or central government, a centralised digital team will break down organisational silos and barriers, push through agile development methods, facilitate adoption of open source solutions and drive innovation. I think we’ll see more and more of this approach in large organisations.

The other big presentation of the day was from Jake Barlow at Government Digital Services (@gdsteam). If Jam’s first keynote talked about the potential of open source for transformation, Jake had the perfect case study for how it’s being delivered in the real world. GDS is a UK government success story, pushing a ‘digital by default’ approach through central government. Among other things, Jake talked about the GDS Service Standard. We’ve been using this at LEO with our work for Civil Service Learning, a combined Drupal and Moodle site that delivers online learning and course booking to half a million civil servants. Jake alluded to a conflict at the heart of the Service Standards: GDS are pushing agile approaches yet the Service Standard has elements of waterfall model in there. It was a real talking point with the audience during Q&A, because as one attendee pointed out, government procurement teams will demand GANTT charts and highly defined deliverables, and you can’t win a government contract based on minimum viable products and daily standups! It feels very much like a ‘watch this space’ area. Jake suggested that SMEs and developers like those in the room today get stuck into the service standard, “use it and abuse it” and feed back on it. It will be really interesting to see where this all goes.

“Gantt charts slam the brakes on a project” nice quote from @gdsteam. Are such controls compatible with agile development? #drupalbizday

— Mark Aberdour (@maberdour) January 16, 2015

GDS have an admirable focus on user needs, this is evident throughout their approach and standards, with user needs informing the prioritisation of tasks. It’s exactly as it should be. I love this approach and it’s great that UK government and GDS are leading the way here, setting a standard that other countries are following. Long may it continue.

You can probably see the big takeaway theme by now: Transformation. It ran through many of today’s presentations.  I’ve increasingly been of the view that open source has reached a ‘job done’ type of moment in that it’s now seen as mature, robust and reliable in almost every market sector. The BlackDuck Future of OSS survey last year summed it up: “Open source is eating the software world”. But it doesn’t matter to me whether open source dominates the software world and ‘defeats’ the likes of Microsoft and Oracle. For me, it’s about levelling the playing field so that open source and proprietary vendors can compete on value and features. In that sense, it does almost feel like ‘job done’.

But reflecting on today’s presentations, especially the keynotes from Jam and Jake, we are not at the end of a journey, we are at the start of a larger one. This new journey is one of transformation. Digital transformation is changing the way we do business and the way we do government, and open source is oiling the wheels of this change. The US and UK governments both now have repositories on Github, which was unheard of just a few years ago. Open source solutions are being deployed rapidly in disaster response zones, where before there was just talk. Open data is ushering in an era of transparency. Where previously only big IT players got a look in, we now have SMEs delivering high quality open source solutions in government, providing value for tax payers and fueling loyal economies. It seems that now we have an increasingly level playing field, the true value of open source is only just starting to be realised. Put simply, it feels like open source is on the cusp of something big. As someone who has been working in open source for going on 10 years, it’s great to be saying that again! This time though, it’s not about acceptance within the software world, it’s about driving change much further afield. Hugely exciting stuff.

Thanks to DrupalCamp Brighton, something really clicked for me today, and I came away enthused, energised and full of ideas. That’s what I love about these types of events, and for a whole host of reasons this is something that I really needed! A big thanks to the organisers, sponsors and attendees for coming together and making a great day.

View the original article here

Tayloring It is open for business!

Over the past 18 months, I’ve had a number of conversations with various people from around our industry as well as outside of it on the subject of ‘going it alone‘, ‘setting up my own business‘, ‘escaping the rat race’ – whatever you want to call it!

First and foremost, I’ve always been flattered that these people have thought that I had ‘something’ that others would be willing to enter into a contract with me to obtain.

Secondly, I’ve always admitted to those people that I have a fear and a dread of leaving safe and secure roles to enter into what I perceive as a more risky world of the ‘self employed’.

However, I now realise that even full time employment in established organisations is still fraught with risks and that anybody – and I’m probably including you, Dear Reader – who doesn’t have a back-up plan or a safety net of some description is probably not doing themselves any favours.

That’s why I’ve decided to take Tayloring It to a slightly different place than I had originally intended when I first started blogging 3 years ago.

I’ve decided to start up my own small consultancy ‘Tayloring It’. Before you ask, “No“, I haven’t left my current role and nor is the writing on the wall - I’m probably happier in this role than I have been in any role since I left the Army in 2006. But that doesn’t mean I can’t start establishing contacts along with developing a portfolio of work and business accumen just in case my world looks different in 12, 24 or however many months in the future. Plus, I’m pretty sure I can help some people/organisations with what they’re trying to achieve too – without it interfering with my day job.

My plan is to offer down to Earth advice on the subject of Learning Technologies and their application in today’s work place.

This advice won’t be based on past glories from years ago or from being a member of elitist Industry ‘think tanks’ – No! – My consultancy will be based upon recent and current experience of deploying learning technologies and the associated aspects within conservative and risk averse industries such as the Nuclear, Rail and Financial sectors.

Recent experience within the eLearning vendor industry has also provided me with fantastic opportunity to become involved in a large number of industries, organisations and projects, the experience from which has only added to my own workplace experiences.

My website is currently being built by a fantastic supporter of my idea, Zak Mensah and will be launched in the next couple of weeks explaining how I might be able to help you out in more detail, but in the meantime here’s a short explanation which will no doubt feature on the website:

Tayloring It is a consultancy that works with individuals and organisations to practically apply technology as a solution to real-world challenges. It could be large scale projects or supporting everyday tasks, but our team has successfully created new approaches that maximise the use of technology while actually saving money/reducing spend. We enhance
communication, learning and performance in the workplace, focusing on outputs not inputs. There are no other services like ours.

Tayloring It aims to change the face of learning technology in practice, one solution at a time.

I’ll be attending both days of Learning Technologies Conference & Exhibition 2013 and will be armed with my rather natty business cards

Tayloring It business card

so if you’d like to find out more about what my plans are the future, why not track me down, have a chat and grab a business card?

Alternatively, if our paths don’t cross, my details are on the card above.

View the original article here

So there I was, wandering around YouTube, minding my own business….

…. when I stumbled upon the ‘edit video detail’ toolbar at the top of the page. Now I had seen this previously and had chosen to ignore it as my video editing is done in either Flipshare or more recently in Windows Movie Maker.

What an oversight on my behalf!!!

Within the video editing options there is an option to add annotations. Now this in itself is nothing startling as many video editing tools allow you to annotate on top of the video footage, but what this allows you to do is to add a ‘spotlight’ on top of anything that is being shown in the YouTube footage.

This spotlight (imagine a hot spot) will then allow a URL (including another YouTube video) to be added to it.

This then allows your YouTube video to become interactive in so far as the viewer can be steered towards making a choice which then jumps them from one YouTube video to another to another etc etc depending upon their choices. For a far more in-depth account as to how to do this then check out this blog post.

Of course I almost fell over myself in an attempt to try this out so I hope you’ll all be able to see past the poor lighting and dodgy camera angles to the real potential that this approach to using YouTube can bring. My only niggle at this moment in time is that upon completion of the clip it  jumps (as any YouTube clip does) to a ‘related videos’ window, this in turn stops the viewer from making any on-screen selection at the end of the clip, so it prevents the viewer from being able reflect upon the available choices.

Confused?

Then try watching the following short clip without making any selection and you’ll see what happens at the end of the video. Then you can replay the video and start taking part for real…

So what do you think?

Is this something you could use?

If so, what for?

View the original article here

So there I was, wandering around YouTube, minding my own business….

…. when I stumbled upon the ‘edit video detail’ toolbar at the top of the page. Now I had seen this previously and had chosen to ignore it as my video editing is done in either Flipshare or more recently in Windows Movie Maker.

What an oversight on my behalf!!!

Within the video editing options there is an option to add annotations. Now this in itself is nothing startling as many video editing tools allow you to annotate on top of the video footage, but what this allows you to do is to add a ‘spotlight’ on top of anything that is being shown in the YouTube footage.

This spotlight (imagine a hot spot) will then allow a URL (including another YouTube video) to be added to it.

This then allows your YouTube video to become interactive in so far as the viewer can be steered towards making a choice which then jumps them from one YouTube video to another to another etc etc depending upon their choices. For a far more in-depth account as to how to do this then check out this blog post.

Of course I almost fell over myself in an attempt to try this out so I hope you’ll all be able to see past the poor lighting and dodgy camera angles to the real potential that this approach to using YouTube can bring. My only niggle at this moment in time is that upon completion of the clip it  jumps (as any YouTube clip does) to a ‘related videos’ window, this in turn stops the viewer from making any on-screen selection at the end of the clip, so it prevents the viewer from being able reflect upon the available choices.

Confused?

Then try watching the following short clip without making any selection and you’ll see what happens at the end of the video. Then you can replay the video and start taking part for real…

So what do you think?

Is this something you could use?

If so, what for?

View the original article here