Time to look again at your Continuing Professional Development?

With businesses everywhere seeking to cut costs, fend off the redundancy option as long as possible and getting the maximum output for their ever-decreasing budgets – you may feel now is not the right time to approach your boss and ask for training. However, now is exactly the time when managment and employees alike need to reassess their approach to training and development.

One of the most important assets of a business is its employees.   Training is understood to be one of the major contributors to the key success factors of an individual or a business.  Astute employers realise the benefits of investing in the training of their staff. In challenging economic times staff training is even more crucial to your business survival and success and is a sound investment you cannot afford to miss.

And for you? Investing in yourself now means that you will be better placed to gain promotion or to find a great job when the job market is at its most competitive. You will feel more in control of your circumstances and future and whilst in employment you will be able to work more effectively.

If you are in employment but wish to learn new skills to enhance your promotional prospects or are thinking of a change of career, short courses are ideal. Carnegie College has just launched its new training directory featuring over 150 courses across 11 subject areas providing details of short training courses that can boost your Continuing Professional Development and enhance your CV.

· Well recognised accredited qualifications such as PRINCE2, MSP, M_o_R
· Bite-sized learning meaning no long term commitment and a more affordable way to build up your qualifications
· Flexible class times including evening or weekend classes or by e-learning enabling you to stay in employment whilst studying.
· Plus…..short training courses in IT, Construction and Gas, Childcare, Beauty Therapy, Health and Safety and much more.

To find out more about our wide range of training courses or to book a place:

· Call Customer Services on 0844 248 0115
· Email info@carnegiecollege.ac.uk OR
· Come along to our Information Event on Thursday 3rd September 4-8pm.

You can also download a copy at www.carnegiecollege.ac.uk

What is ‘World Class Service’?

At various free workshops and seminars we’ve helped run this year in St Andrews, we asked you to come up with your definitions of ‘world class service’.  Here is a graphic representation (courtesy of http://www.wordle.net) of what you said.  The bigger the word, the more often it was used.

What do you think? Are you surprised about which words came up most often? Are there any that you would add? Tell us about them by commenting below and we’ll make a new Wordle of your comments.

Making the Homecoming Work for You and your Visitors

Catherine Bowie is one of the St Andrews Skills Academy’s approved training providers (CBTS), and in this article she blogs for us about Homecoming and how to make the most of the opportunities presented. Thank you Catherine!

For the Homecoming to be a success, it is vital that we offer as much information as is possible on our area, and give visitors practical tips so that we can ensure that each of the Homecoming tourists receives a real Scottish welcome and goes home raving about what Scotland has to offer. Rarely are we given this opportunity and the spotlight of the world will be on us – are we prepared?

Firstly, consider the kind of visitors which the Homecoming will attract and their profile – ancestral visitors come to Scotland with different expectations; however it should be noted that they tend to be well informed, expect extremely detailed information and are able to talk a great deal about their family history and their discoveries!

One of the most important aspects of their research is visiting places where they have a connection and this could be as simple as a castle or a visitor attraction but they may require information on the local family history society, graveyards or facts on industrial heritage. Here is the opportunity to make a difference. Many of our visitors will be very value conscious so it’s all about offering information on things that represent added value to their visit.

Learn about cultural differences.  Here are useful links to the Visit Britain site offering insight on some of the prospective homecoming markets:

USA

Canada

Australia

New Zealand

South Africa

Other countries

These are very useful resources, detailing tips on how to offer these visitors the kind of service they expect, and ideas for subtle nuances which can really make you stand out in your service offerings.

Secondly, Homecoming visitors will expect a warm Scottish welcome – many ancestral visitors come to Scotland to seek a connection so it is essential that we bring out warmth and build rapport immediately so that they feel at home. Many visitors do not like to be classified as tourists – they want to feel more as if they are coming home.

Many Homecoming visitors have preconceived ideas about what Scotland has to offer and they appreciate the traditional approaches in tourism & hospitality even if we don’t perceive them to be mainstream. You need to respect these wishes as these are often what create the best memories. Find out where great afternoon tea or authentic fish and chips are being served, and where ceilidhs, Highland Games, golf tournaments, Scottish theatre, local art and crafts exhibitions etc are being held; be pro-active about promoting such events.

Engage with your visitors professionally and ensure that you and your staff are positive about your area and Scotland and all that it can offer. It is easy to allow current affairs to cast a shadow on our mood, however this is not attractive to our visitors; they are seeking to connect with vibrant and dynamic people.

Stay up to date with what’s going on in your area and create a file with important visitor services information. Find out about events and keep useful information such as local church times, contact details for key people, menus from local restaurants and (of course) an up-to date events listing for what’s on in your area. Find out where the local family history society is and where other documents are held. Ancestral visitors really appreciate access to a computer as so much of their research is conducted this way.
Stick to these tips and not only enhance the visitor experience look professional but also act as a great advertisement for Scotland!

RSS feeds – what they are and how to use them

RSS feeds – have you heard of them? Twitter is a glorified set of RSS feeds, but there are many other uses for these handy alerts. Watch this video, from the CommonCraft people in conjunction with Google, and give RSS feeds a try. Subscribe to the St Andrews Skills Academy blog, so that you’ll always know when we’ve posted something new.

If you also install the Google Toolbar, you can add a ‘Google Reader’ button, which will glow bright green whenever a new RSS alert comes in. How’s that for an efficiency measure?!

Do you subscribe to RSS feeds? Tell us about your experiences here.

Delivering Service Excellence – what’s it all about?

Last week I had the pleasure of observing one of the famed 100 Thousand Welcomes courses, run by one of our approved training providers, Ian Hunt.   Ian had kindly agreed to let me sit in on his day-long ‘Delivering Service Excellence’ session so that I would be able to pass on first-hand experience of the course.

The day started at 9.15 am, as attendees began to drift into the airy Champions’ Room at the Golf Practice Centre, St Andrews. Tea, coffee, shortbread and Ian all stood by ready to welcome them.  By 9.30 all the participants had assembled and Ian took the floor. From the start the day was very dynamic and participative, but also very objective focussed. After outlining the topics for the day, Ian had each attendee introduce themselves with their name and place of work, but also with the most memorable, positive service experience of which they had been a part.

With this interactive slant, the delegates soon warmed up, as they worked in different groups to complete the various tasks that Ian had set (from a quiz about St Andrews and Scotland – including ‘Why is the thistle Scotland’s national emblem?’ and ‘How many top-class golf courses are within a ten-mile drive from St Andrews?’ – to creating a poster and presentation of the key factors of service excellence).

The day was broken up into five training sessions:

Session 1 – Fife and Scottish tourism

Session 2 – Meeting and exceeding customer and guest expectations

Break – tea, coffee, and homemade scones

Session 3 – How to demonstrate a Positive Attitude

Lunch – soup and sandwiches at the Eden Clubhouse

Session 4 – Dealing with feedback (taking appropriate action and recording)

Break – more tea, coffee and shortbread

Session 5 – Improving in the future

Before lunch, participants were asked to reflect on their current work practices, rating themselves and looking for ways in which they could further strive for service excellence. Before leaving, the delegates filled out an action plan to take back into their workplaces and work on with their employers. Only if they send the completed forms back to Ian would participants receive their ‘Delivering Service Excellence’ certification.

A big thank you to all the employers who supported the St Andrews Skills Academy by sending along delegates, to Dorothy Murphy and the lovely staff at the Golf Practice Centre for accommodating us so seamlessly again, and of course to Ian for providing a fantastic training experience for attendees and observers alike!

If you would be interested in sending your staff on a 100k Welcomes course, or in attending yourself, please visit the St Andrews Skills Academy website or leave comments below.

Google Labs tests new ‘City Tours’ feature

The ever-innovative Google has launched online testing of a new application: Google City Tours. Using information from Google Maps, it creates three-day city itinieraries which group themselves by proximity to the city centre.  For examples of the new gadget working at its best, Google suggests searching cities such as London and Dublin, but it seems to generate some sort of tour for any city you type in.  Edinburgh’s, for example, looks quite feasible, if a little arbitrary.  Type in a St Andrews/East Neuk location, however, and the itinerary is fairly sparse (and includes a random Dundee design company).

I think that the tours might be generated by business information entered onto Google maps.  Tools like this are likely to take off in a big way soon, and so I’d recommend that you check the business information that Google holds for you, in order to have the best chance of featuring in this new generation of travel guidance.

I’ll keep you posted as to how the Google City Tours tool progresses, so do come back and check!

Welcoming Chinese Tourists

Australian learning and development company TravConsult have launched a non-commercial blog to help businesses (the tourism industry in particular) to better engage with the growing Chinese market.  Interactive and highly educational (if colourful and slightly unwieldy), this blog has scores of links to cultural advice, language guides, recipes, and even the Chinese weather!

Check out their blog here: TravConsult – China

Whether or not you find the TravConsult blog useful, it is worth noting that the global tourism industry is becoming very interested in local culture: not just the promotion of their own local treasures, but the understanding of their visitors’. If you are looking to expand the range of clientele your organisation attracts, perhaps it is worth considering what you can do to make them feel at home.

The training provider assessment panel

This week, we’ve been travelling around St Andrews and the East Neuk, introducing our training provider assessment process to the employers who will be helping us to form our assessment panel.  We have representatives from ‘Stay in St Andrews’, St Andrews Bed and Breakfast Association, the Merchant’s Association, and the Fife Tourism Alliance, each of whom has kindly volunteered their time to help us mark the applications from training providers who want to list their courses on the St Andrews Skills Academy website.

The first person we met was Ben McLeod, manager of the House Restaurants in St Andrews. He was good enough to drag himself away from his restaurants during the lunchtime rush to meet us in the Gateway Centre. Representing the Merchants’ Association, Ben turned up looking like the epitome of cool, with beautiful leather accessories and a casual shirt.

Straight after meeting Ben, we headed over to the Old Course Hotel, where we sat in the beautifully appointed library, sipping cappucinos and nibbling homemade shortbread.  You might be forgiven for thinking that we were taking an afternoon break, but actually, these were just the luxurious surroundings for a strictly business call to Anna Maciver, the Senior Training Specialist at the Old Course Hotel, and the second member of our employer panel, representating ‘Stay in St Andrews’.

Later on, I met with Ken Lawson, the charming owner of the Spindrift Guesthouse in Anstruther.  He leads the Fife Tourism Alliance, and kindly offered his time to help us with the assessments, despite his tastefully decorated guesthouse being one of the busiest in the East Neuk. Spending around ten minutes summarizing the assessment procedure, I stayed with Ken for about another twenty minutes discussing the Fife tourism climate and setting the world (or the East Neuk, at least) to rights.

Finally, to James Yule, chairman of the Bed & Breakfast Association, and owner of Braeside House Bed & Breakfast.  Extremely efficient but also highly competent, James grasped the process within minutes of my arrival, which meant that I could only enjoy the embrace of his exceptionally comfortable sofa for a very wee while.

This might sound like all play and no work, but we at the St Andrews Skills Academy think that it is vital to have the voices of employers on this assessment panel.  Employers are the ones who will be using the training providers listed on our site, and so employers should have a say in deciding which providers should be approved. The four people who have so generously volunteered their expertise to our assessment panel are going to be helping us to maintain that vital employer focus.

At the same time, we don’t want to disadvantage any training providers, so we’ve made the assessment process completely anonymous. Training providers send me their application forms, and I remove any personal or business names, replacing them instead with a unique identifying code.

I then send the new, anonymous file, out to the panel.  They fill out an online marksheet for each application code.  The panel gives marks out of 5 for three different areas: ‘Sector and Employer Engagement’, ‘Feedback and Evaluation Procedures’ and ‘Meeting and Exceeding Client Expectations’.  A total mark of 9/15 or more entails a pass, and training providers who achieve this are approved to appear on our website.

We’re currently in the process of marking our first eight new applicants, and most these will be entering our website within a few weeks of the launch.  Watch this space!

Learning Styles

Today at the St Andrews Skills Academy, I’ve been researching learning styles. A fairly recent concept in the study of education and training is the notion that people respond differently to various types of stimuli.  While some of the UK’s population would have found the Victorian teaching style quite accessible, it now seems that it might have actually had a negative impact on some childrens’ learning.

There are several different models that academics have proposed for understanding and categorising different learning styles, but one of the more relevant ones adult training is the Felder-Silverman model.  You can access a free online learning style test for the Felder-Silverman model here.

Simply put, the Felder-Silverman assessment offers questions to place you on a spectrum for four learning ‘types’: Acting & Reflecting, Sensing & Intuitive, Visual & Verbal, and Sequential & Global. Between the four characteristics with which you end up, you can get an idea for the sorts of ways of learning that work best for you.

You can find more information about these learning styles from the official site here, along with ideas for how best to compensate when training does not cater for your preferred learning styles.

Once you know about your learning preferences, consider the sorts of training that might be best suited to you.  For example, if you are heavily weighted towards ‘Acting’, then you might find it useful to look into practical, hands-on training, such as an SVQ, or a Modern Apprenticeship. If you are a very visual learner, perhaps there is some web-based learning that involves a lot of video clips and diagrams to help explain it’s points.

A word of warning though; none of these learning styles theories are without their flaws and critics.  While it wouldn’t hurt to think about when you’ve learned well, and what might have brought that about, these styles are not necessarily fixed, and it will do more harm than good to permanently label yourself with your learning style.

Has thinking about your learning styles helped you understand more about yourself and the sorts of training that would be best suited to you? Do you have any learning experiences that you would like to share? Tell us all about it by commenting below.

The joy of business blogs…

I’ve spent all morning researching blogs for the St Andrews Skills Academy, and I must admit: I’m quite excited about them.

Lots of marketing specialists have recently been suggesting that one of the best ways to improve a website’s search engine ranking is to write regular entries on a dedicated web log, or ‘blog’ about related topics, linking always to the main website.  When Nick White (manager of the popular Inn at Lathones and a member of the St Andrews Skills Academy Advisory Board) also recommended blogging as a great way to generate extra visibility, I decided to sit down – with a strong coffee – and start reading up on blogging.

The world of blogs seemed, at first glance, to be quite a geeky community; people who like using their computers talking to other people who like using their computers. However, within three sips of my cappucino, I began to realise that a good blog could be a powerful marketing tool.

Here are a few examples of ways in which a blog could benefit your business (please leave comments with ideas of your own):

• First and foremost – a web presence.  If you don’t already have a website, a blog is a free, simple way to make yourself known. Post information about your opening hours, prices, location and reviews and encourage visitors to your business to leave feedback on your blog about their visitor experiences.

• A way to attract potential visitors by giving them a feel for your personality and business ethos. If you blog more generally about your life as well as your business, or even if you just write in a more informal style, readers will feel that they know something about you, and this may make them more likely to visit your business.

• An exhibition space for your expertise; a platform from which to show your visitors that you are passionate and knowledgeable about your business area.  Mention products and business models that you like and how you plan to use them. Perhaps even offer advice for how other people could benefit from them.  So, if you manage a coffee shop, perhaps run a category about different gourmet coffees that you’ve tried, or give tips for making the best coffee at home.  If you run a B&B, share your latest breakfast menus and a few recipes to try at home.

• A method of keeping visitors informed about how you are updating and improving your service.  Your visitor feedback forms could include a link to your blog address, so that they can follow up your responses to their comments on the web, without having to give you their contact details. Posting blogs celebrating the good feedback you received is a great way to encourage both visitors and your own staff.  Publishing any negative feedback, along with the measures that you have put in place in response to it, may persuade the more difficult customers to make a return visit.

If you’re not convinced, or want more information, check out this YouTube video about benefits and tips for business blogging.

YouTube – How to have profitable conversations 3:Blogging for Business.

Ready to get started? WordPress is one of the most popular blogging sites, and you can set up an account in seconds.

I’ll keep posting in this ‘Web 2.0′ category as I discover more about blogs and other methods of social marketing. If you have a chance, do try using these techniques, then come back here and let us know how it’s going.

Good luck!

For more ideas, resources, and training options, visit the St Andrews Skills Academy.