Adatis

Align Learn Do works with Adatis to expand the training talents of their client principles and data scientists.

Background

Providing services for both the public and private sector, Adatis has, over the last 10 years gone from an idea in a Texas bar to having 4 offices across the UK, Bulgaria and India. Adatis has made a name for being the go-to consultancy for data services.

The Challenge

Adatis has a group of very talented customer-facing consultants that help with the training and embedding of the technology solutions that they sell.  This group, while being very knowledgeable, did not have all the skills required to train their customers as well as they wanted to.

The group of consultants that need upskilling have different levels of training experience and technical expertise.

The Solution

Align Learn Do were engaged to create a Train the Trainer programme that could be rolled out across the consultant population.  Here, Head of People Deborah Upton outlines the process and outcomes from the engagement

Following a review of our internal training material to see what content could be hosted on our new LMS, it became apparent that a large amount of the material was “presented” and needed to be adapted for learning.

All our business consultants already attend a presentation course, a critical skill for their role but following delivery of projects, there is frequently a need to provide in house training as we hand over product.  Also, a big part of our culture is to share our learning with each other.  The format for sharing varies, it can be121 during mentoring meetings, to smaller groups of subject interest or whole company lunch and learns, plus what we call Space Days (days off projects for innovation).

I had been following Neil’s (Align Learn Do’s founder + L&D Solutions Director) LinkedIn videos for some time after I came across his content when uplifting our competency matrix and liked his style of teaching and presenting.  I felt his style would work well with our business and so emailed him and the meeting was set.

During our initial exploration call, we outlined that the request was for a Train the Trainer course for some data scientists and principle consultants, with the aim to make the Training they ran for existing clients more effective and so we could broaden our offering in this area to prospective clients and develop this as an additional revenue stream.

We decided to first run a pilot group with individuals of different experiences and lengths of service within the business; a really mixed bag of people.

We talked about the need and he respectfully questioned why we were doing it, and what we wanted to achieve. He then went away and with the agreed timeframe came back with the proposal and price.  We agreed and the work started.

I was impressed that the team at Align Learn Do put in the provision to speak to the pilot group and complete their due diligence through 121 calls with them ahead of the training.  This was to benchmark the skillset and ensure that day met the needs of the diverse group.  Though we’ve been told it never felt like a benchmarking exercise, it just felt like an intro call and good conversation.

Once the specific Train the Trainer training was created, we ran the pilot at our office in Farnham.  The group loved it.  They loved the interactive style of the workshop, the exercises, the mix of individual and group work.

They also loved the fact that got to improve the content they already delivered so there wasn’t extra work for them to do before the day started.

Based on the group’s feedback alone we’ve run it again for a cohort in London and are looking at how we provision this across the group for our colleagues in Bulgaria and India.