Providing soft skills and leadership training for a global engineering consultancy

Every manager needs good soft skills — but when time is tight these can often be forgotten. For this client, delivering outcome driven, focused leadership training meant that their business could continue to thrive. 

With 2,200 employees, and 31 locations worldwide, this global practice of engineers and consultants pride themselves on having a culture of collaboration and respect. As a project-led company, they are driven by productivity and effectiveness and set a 80% utilisation target for their employees.

Committed to wellbeing and overcoming internal barriers, they understood the importance of good training for their employees. But travelling to and from training destinations for face-to-face training meant taking large amounts of time out of their days — a big hit to productivity. Transitioning their employee training to virtual delivery gave them the increased efficiency they were looking for.

The global head of learning and development had experience of VTT’s skills in virtual learning and leadership development training. 

The metrics

• 100+ workshops delivered since Jan of 2021

Challenge

Colleagues were great at managing projects and solutions in the consulting world but they needed the skills to manage people just as well as their projects. This was where VTT focussed its efforts. 

A series of programmes were developed and delivered to a range of participants across the organisation, including line managers, middle managers, graduates, and senior leaders. 

The main challenge when delivering the programmes was time. Days were tightly scheduled due to being a project-driven company. Working on client projects took priority. As such, the training workshops had to fit around this. Most importantly the time spent on the training delivered had to be of the highest quality. It needed to be outcome driven and purposeful. In short, it had to deliver. Scheduling time out to attend training was challenging for participants and it was up to VTT to ensure the training delivered was meaningful and impactful for them. 

Solution

Delivering high quality training is second nature for us at VTT. For our client, what really set us apart was our tailored way of working. VTT coaches are expert at managing groups and connecting with individuals. They adapt their delivery to suit the needs of the participants in the room and flex the workshops depending on the group. Delivering the programmes on a global scale meant we needed to cater for multiple time zones. Participants needed the training to fit into their schedule so we designed the workshops to be “bite sized”. 

We worked to create leadership training programmes that the client believed would be beneficial to their employees needs at that time — focusing on soft skills, best practice, and leadership techniques. Each programme was unique, composed of different workshops designed for a variety of cohorts and focusing on the different skillsets needed.

As always, our approach remained open, and when they needed something more bespoke for a specific programme, we designed a personalised training plan for them.

Result

• We continue to work with this client — our ongoing partnership is a result of how highly they value our work and our customer service.
• We are involved with many different programmes that we run across the year and are involved with training people on every level of the organisation.  
• We have run multiple leadership training programmes, including:
  • Learning to lead (for middle managers) and High performing teams (for mid to senior managers)
  • Personal effectiveness — (for new graduates and early careers)
• The feedback from participants is excellent — they love our research backed approach, flexible ways of working, and the high-quality and impactful learning experiences we continue to deliver.