An update on Think Eleven company news and performance for quarter two, 2020.

Covid-19

Our thoughts go out to those people and families who have suffered personal loss and to the front-line staff of the NHS, care workers, blue light services, food retail, delivery drivers and many more who are helping the UK survive and get through this together. We thank and applaud their bravery, expertise and courage.

Using our time wisely, preparing for the rebound post Covid-19

We don’t want to trivialise the significance or impact the coronavirus is having on human life and the economy; however, those of you either still at work or working from home may wish to use this time to reflect on opportunities for improvement. An example of this might be to look at and review your approach to training, development and your wider competency framework. The aim of this should be to comeback stronger, better and more competitive in your market. Something to consider, is how well have you coped and responded to the Coronavirus? This has been a stress test for possibly every aspect of your organisation and could provide an interesting case-study to identify gaps and areas for improvement. Some of these may be cultural and/or behavioural and link to the strategy and leadership of the organisation.

If you’d like to discuss this, please don’t hesitate to get in-touch as we’re happy to provide support and guidance during these challenging times. We can arrange webinars and conference calls to support you by contacting us on: Email: onebetter@thinkeleven.co.uk

Office: 01429 839293 (we’re picking up messages remotely)

Mobile: 07947 409838

A look back at Q1 2020

Q1 got off to a really positive start with our new website delivering a significant increase in both demo and quote requests. We have also experienced good traction and engagement through our Blogs, Vlogs and wider Social Media activity. Why not follow-us on LinkedIn and/or Twitter.

I don’t think anyone was expecting Q1 of the new year to be so challenging due to Covid-19 (Coronavirus). I also don’t believe many organisations, if any, had a global pandemic on their risk register or part of their Business or Disaster Continuity planning. Hats off to you if you did.

New Customers & Opportunities

During Q1 2020 we on-boarded the following customers:

Christeyns 

Specialists in hygiene, Christeyns stands for crystal clean, their trademark. A blend of premium chemicals, reliable equipment and flexible, customised service. Their hygiene portfolio includes chemicals and equipment for 4 market segments: 

• Professional Textile Care 
• Food Processing & Retail 
• Professional Cleaning  
• Health Care 

Grass Valley

Develop and deliver end-to-end ecosystem of reliable, open standards-based solutions helping content creators, broadcasters and media organizations to produce brilliant content and build successful media businesses. Their award-winning technology and trusted industry expertise empower their customers to create captivating experiences that connect people anywhere, on any device, through the magic of media. 

Opportunities

We are also in discussion with several significant organisations across diverse sectors including: 

• Armed Forces 
• Defence 
• Large global beverage producer 
• Large trade association 
• Large US Logistics 
• Regional Police force 
• UK Automotive manufacture 

SkillStation Rebrand 

The SkillStation re-brand/design successfully went live at end of Feb 2020 and has received excellent feedback from across our customer base and during prospect demonstrations.  We’re always delighted to receive feedback as this is how we continually improve. 

One feature of the new design is the functionality to brand SkillStation in-line with your corporate brand and colour scheme.

There’s no need to panic – the functionality has remained the same.  Some of the changes include: 

• Modern iconography 
• The default colour scheme is now blue to align with our new brand identity 
• The ability to change the brand colour scheme to align with your own 
• A review of page layout for easier navigation 
• Where possible we’ve reduced the number of clicks to achieve a specific task 
• Reduced clutter and increased white space for easy page navigation and all-round faster use 

Here’s a few Screen Shots to give you a flavour of the new look and feel.  We hope you like it. 

New Service – Outsourced Training & Development 

We’ve introduced a new service to reflecting on the market, our existing clients and where we can add value and benefit.  Some organisations don’t have an in-house Training/Learning & Development function, so we can fill this gap in an agile and cost-effective way. 

Examples of service provision include: 

• Audit and report of your full learning and development processes and systems 
• Production of learning and development policies, procedures and processes to address any shortfalls identified during the audit 
• Access to strategic and tactical outsourced learning and development expertise and support 
• Identification of the optimum solutions to fill knowledge and skills gaps 

• Sourcing of high impact training providers through our partner network 
• Support to identify potential funding opportunities based on the organisation and individual eligibility criteria 
• Ensuring all of your learning and development activity delivers value and impact 

To find out more about our new Outsourced Training & Development service get in-touch. 

Office Move – space to grow 

One the 2nd of March we moved into our new office at The Old Brewery, Castle Eden, County Durham.  Don’t worry, it’s no longer a brewery so we’re not enjoying ourselves too much.  It does however have an Italian restaurant, Maximos in reception, which serves an excellent range of delicious food and large portions too!  There’s a danger our waistlines may expand a little over the coming months. 

Our new office provides space for us to grow as well-as a venue to host on-site events including a series of workshops and masterclasses, currently in the planning process.  We look forward to sharing the dates once they’re planned. 

What’s coming next 

We are in the process of making SkillStation even more amazing and one of, if not, the best training, learning, competency, compliance and performance management solutions on the market. 

It is quite common for people to refer to systems like SkillStation as a Learning Management System (LMS) or Training Management System (TMS); however, SkillStation is so much more than either of these.  Our approach and system enables you to track the entire training, learning and development process and each component of that journey towards competence.  This includes on-the-job training, off-site vendor training, assessment of knowledge, projects, self-assessments, line-managers assessments and many more. 

Our technical team are in the process of making SkillStation SCORM conformant.  This means it will support the ability to host either your own or third-party e-learning content.  So, whilst also having the ability to capture all of your conventional training, learning and development activity, you will soon be able to capture and record the results of e-learning (acquisition of knowledge). 

In doing this, we are also researching the market and will be advising on e-learning content authoring tools for organisations/people who are complete beginners, and those of you who are more advanced with an established content authoring team. 

Another aspect we’ll be investigating is a recommended list of e-learning providers and potential partners to help quickly find and support solutions for you. 

We anticipate this being available by the end of Q2 2020, so watch this space. 

External Events 

Sadly, Covid-19 has resulted in the postponement or cancellation of the conventional events calendar.  We were scheduled to attend a number of events which included Think Eleven either speaking and/or exhibiting at these. 

On a positive, many organisations have responded in an agile way and are either arranging webinars via Zoom and similar platforms or postponed their events until later in the year. 

Blogs & Vlogs 

We are now in the swing of creating more regular blogs and vlogs on our website and sharing these through our social media channels, in particular LinkedIn and Twitter.  We’ll also be inviting guest bloggers/vloggers, so if you have something to say/share we’d be happy to support this. 

Our most recent vlogs: 

• Are you leveraging value from your people, (click here) to access the vlog 
• Developing a transformational Competency Framework (click here) to access the vlog 

Follow us on Twitter & LinkedIn 

SkillStation 

If you’re new to SkillStation, here’s a quick overview of the benefits and value our innovative online solution can deliver to any organisation regardless of size, sector or location: 

Benefits include 

• Training, skills and competency data at your fingertips from any connected device 
• Streamline and optimise your learning & development processes 
• Quickly identify and address gaps in capability by individual, function, department, site, division or enterprise 
• Identify optimum solutions to close training and skills gaps 

• Email notification of re-training and re-certification dates 90, 60 and 30-days in advance 
• Detailed and user-friendly reporting 

Helping you take control and optimise your most important resource… your PEOPLE.