5 Ways To Keep Corporate Training Fresh

One of my first business mentors was Heinz Wolhard Buttkewitz (RIP), a German engineer who ran started several successful businesses in South Africa. I first met him when he ran the Corporate Brain Aerobics Olympiad with his company, Dymcor - Dynamic Marketing Corporation. Some of the lessons in this article was inspired by him.

This was also published in Destiny Magazine in 2012.

All my training workshops I’ve developed under NETucation have been designed for skills transfer and not to obtain qualifications. Here is my experience:

We live in a complex world filled with confusion and often leads to conflict in personal and work relationships. Training for qualifications received a major backlash in 2010 when Peter Thiel, a Paypal founder and early investor in Facebook, created the Thiel Fellowship. He awarded $100,000 each to 20 people under 20 years old in order to spur them to quit college and create their own ventures.

So here's my five steps to keep your corporate training fresh:

1. When dealing with the Complexity of your business or industry, seek training courses that will help you understand the big picture and how to avoid the paradox of choice. Clarity helps you to simplify problems and break them down into more manageability parts to solve.
2. Bypass confusion by selecting the older and more established universities or colleges. There is a tremendous problem with confidence in most government subsidised training from forced compulsory schooling through FET colleges. Leadership in an industry takes discipline, hard work and focus. You may consider the MOOC platforms like edX.
3. Sidestep conflicting information by modelling your career on the top international experts in your field. Magazines like Fortune often publish ranking of top companies to work for, top professionals under 40 and powerful women in business lists. Use these as a barometer of your company strategy. Collaboration on social networks like LinkedIn is a 100 times more valuable than Facebook because it allows you to go very deep into the training topics you need on a daily basis.
4. Tap into the TED.com video library to gain first hand knowledge from the world’s leading experts. This invite only-conference in Long Beach, California has published over 1,000 videos from 5-18 minutes in length from scientists, economists, authors, technologists, inventors, educators, artists and more. This is freely available.
5. Strategic Coach is the world’s leading business coaching program for entrepreneurs. Their models revolutionised how entrepreneurs increase their free time and breaking through ceilings of complexity. One of their core concepts is the 10x growth model. Set bigger goals to achieve bigger results.