When your world falls apart twice in a matter of months, you think, is it trying to tell you something?
The day was Thursday the 12th of March 2020, in the previous nine weeks I had spent a week in hospital with double pneumonia and because of this been forced to cancel all my appointments and live training sessions.
Driving into Leeds on that day I was still quite positive even with all the talk of this COVID thing, I was going to sign up two reasonable size deals that would get us back on track for a great 2020, life was good.
Then I got the first call, “Sorry Mike the US have told us to close the office until further notice, I’ll be in touch in a few weeks when this has all blown over.”
The second call came before I even got off the M1, “Hi Mike, we are just going into an emergency board meeting to work out our COVID strategy, so we are going to have to postpone signing up for the training for a while.”
We all know the rest of the story…
Face to face training, which we specialise in was dead for the foreseeable future, virtual training using Zoom and Teams just does not have anything like the same level of impact and was not something we felt comfortable charging for.
Don’t get me wrong, we were very lucky, we already worked from home and our agency and consulting clients, which were mainly remote work anyway would keep the wolf from the door. Many of our friends lost their businesses due to the lack of help for small Limited Companies during the crisis.
As the crisis dragged on, we became more and more determined never to be in this position again, for a while we had been looking at ways to provide the same corporate type training to SME’s and even Sole Traders, we had the content just not a delivery method that was within their budget.
Our courses are based on four main pillars.
1. Our training modules are based on peer-reviewed content wherever possible.
2. People forget up to 80% of any training within a couple of days, so every trainee gets five follow-ups over the six months after the training.
3. All our trainers must have experience doing the job they are training.
4. Every trainee receives a pack of Flash Cards with a brief recap of each training module for review and follow-up.
The cards were the key to moving forward, rather than just have key takeaways as reminders could we summarised each full training module onto one or two cards.
Our 21st Century Business Skills Card decks were born, conveniently supplied in a mini desk top card file, they break all the information down into easy-to-digest chunks that trainees can quickly learn and review for maximum retention.
“When fishermen cannot go to sea, they repair nets.” ― Nabil Sabio Azadi
Available now on our website as a physical box or a digital download the 21st Century Business Skills Card Decks deliver 65 business critical, real-world skills, and allow anyone to create their own training workshops and staged reviews quickly and easily.
Mike Hardcastle – Novalead Limited