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 they could ensure all their leaders received high quality training in this area.
- Situation:A global engineering and consultancy firm, who wanted to provide their teams with the skills they need through high quality, highly efficient learning experiences.
- Challenge:Equipping time-poor participants with soft skills to develop improved ways of working.
- Solution:A series of programmes, composed of multiple workshops covering all of the skills employees needed to succeed, designed and delivered by VTT.
- Result:An ongoing relationship with the client, multiple global programmes delivered and consistently glowing feedback!
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.
Having already worked with VTT whilst at a previous company, the global head of learning and development, knew VTT are experts in virtual learning and leadership development training.
The metrics
- 163 workshops delivered since Jan of 2021
Challenge
Our customer’s employees were great at managing projects and managing solutions in the world of engineering but they needed to be given the skills to manage their people just as well as they managed their projects. This was where we stepped in.
The client wanted us to deliver training across several different programmes to a range of people across the organisation, from line managers, middle managers, new graduates, and senior leaders.
The main challenge when approaching training was time. Every second of the day was tightly scheduled because being a project-driven company, working on client projects took priority. As such, the leadership training had to fit around this. But most importantly we needed to make the time spent on the training worthwhile which meant that what we 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 no easy feat for the participants — and it was up to us to make sure the training we gave was meaningful and impactful for them.
Solution
Delivering high quality training is second nature for us at VTT. But for this client, what really set us apart was our tailored way of working. Never a one-size-fits all, our coaches were experts at reading the room (or screen, should we say). They could adapt their delivery to suit the needs of the participants in the room and flex the workshops depending on the cohort. Experts at remaining fluid in their approach, which all enhanced the learning transfer, they ensured the sessions were both effective and meaningful. We adjusted our working times to suit the client which was essential to our work together — delivering the programmes on a global scale meant we needed to juggle multiple time zones. Participants needed the training to fit into their day 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 cohort 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 and have done for 6 years now — our ongoing partnership is a result of how highly they value our work and our customer service.
- We are involved with many different programs 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.
