I can so well remember as a junior civil servant, many of the mandatory training courses we used to endure. In the early days, it was a matter of the training team coming to our offices – those considered by their line managers as being better at knowledge sharing. They would undertake a short course themselves on how to teach others and off they went. Later these teams were disbanded when the training was reorganised as a multi stream online package. I was one of the testers for much of the new programmes. the actual subjects covered were many and varied but for me the most successful were those with humour and helpful cartoon like presenters – with multi choice push button answers. We noted that more colleagues actually listened to the point of the training if it wasn’t dull or childishly easy. My mantra was always ‘If a manager can understand me and complete the course then so will their team’.
