It wasn’t just eating food and celebrating all things learning, but cakes and celebrations were definitely part of the day at this practical learning event yesterday.

Here’s my headline takeaways for those of you who want to know what’s new, trending and important in learning and development from the key speakers: 

• Learning and development and talent development are intrinsically connected So whenever we work on one we need to look at it through the lens of the other. For example, how is a programme of workshops on well-being supporting our talent development, and how is a talent development initiative also supporting our staff’s learning and development around well-being? Working in this way is efficient and necessary. For me this focused my thinking and especially makes sense where we want to break down silo cultures.
• We went on a journey interactively through the fundamentals of evaluating actions and achievements with an activity-based ‘journey to courage’ framework.
• Ideas were shared about learning needing to have humanity, community and business impact, not just learning impact.
• We leaned into programme evaluation, knowing much more about our client group and their strategic goal, their financial situation, their priorities and their culture so that we can use this as a way to evaluate success of learning and development, rather than focusing on numbers of attendees and how well the programme landed.
• Finally a structured time to process, discuss insights or be creative gave us all an opportunity to find space in the midst of intensive workshops, keynotes and talks. A powerful inclusive way of working.

Interestingly resilience was less of a theme and AI a bigger theme. 

My first Training Journal conference and it was a real success.  Thanks to many speakers and many  others for leadership, coordination, keynotes, lots of additional ideas and input and a joyful day.