Learning – Page 4 – The Consulting Artist

Leap Day 2016

Leap Day 2016 Logo

A quick reminder, this year we get a bonus day in the calendar, Monday Feb 29th is Leap Day. Four years ago several of us took advantage of this extra day and gathered in London for some useful fun. Several lovely opportunities for reflection arose throughout the day too, including this scene, titled ‘The Anonymous Artist’, beautifully captured by Jon Bartlett.

Leap Day 2016 is starting to take shape and will involve a number of curious, cocreated and community minded things to try out. Here’s a first cut of what we might get up to on the day. Would you like to join us?

Down_the_Rabbit_Hole — Down the rabbit hole

On Leap Day, we will meet around 10.30am at the Alice in Wonderland exhibition, in the entrance hall of the British Library.

I am planning some things for us to do throughout the day and there will be room for improvisation too. If you would like to bring an idea along for us to play with – feel free, and please be aware that we may not use it. I intend to have too much to do for the time we are together. Some of the fun will be in choosing what to do and what not to do. The day is over when it is over – leave when it suits you. We may totter into a pub in the late afternoon/early evening – we’ll see. Feel free to take part in as much or as little as you choose – the day will be invitational as far as we can make it so.

There is a small charge per head to cover design and materials, £30 plus VAT = £36.

I’ll provide details of how to get that to me below and your place will be confirmed once the money has been exchanged. You’ll need to budget for your own food and refreshments along the way and I’m not currently planning to use a fixed venue – we will be on the move stopping at various interesting and unusual places through the day to do cool stuff.

I’d prefer not to use EventBrite or PayPal to collect money as their fees will only add to the cost. Please contact me directly through the website, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and I will give you my bank details. You then ping me the money, I send you a receipt and your place is confirmed. Simple as that.

Update: February 10th 2016. There are two places left for Leap Day 2016, if you fancy coming along it would be lovely to see you.

Curiouser and Curiouser

I was fortunate to spend time with Year 6 pupils at St Thomas’ School in West London recently. The school were having an ‘Inspire Me’ week and through my membership of the excellent Inspiring The Future network I’d agreed to go a long and give a career talk. I enjoy volunteering through Inspiring The Future – as well as career talks, there are opportunities to spend time with school children helping them with CV and interview skills. Anyone in the world of work can register to join the scheme and I encourage you to take a look – I find it fulfilling, useful, enjoyable volunteer work.

Prior to my visit – I had invited the pupils to send me questions so that I could build a talk around their interests rather than make assumptions about what they might want to hear. On arrival at the school I was given a fantastic guided tour by some of the kids and then we spent time talking about careers. There were some great questions in the mix and I thought I’d share a few of them with you.

Who inspired you to achieve the career you have now?

I talked about my Mum and how first and foremost she always encouraged me to be myself. I told the kids that I try hard to live up to that encouragement and I often don’t come up to scratch – and that’s OK, keep trying. I spoke about Joe Strummer ( #nerdalert – the school was located very close by to where The Clash came into existence) and his strong views on anti-racism and anti-ignorance. The kids didn’t know who he was – but they knew London Calling, the London 2012 legacy lives on.

Tell us 3 cool things about your job?

I picked art, travel and making a difference. We talked together about places we’d visited and would like to visit, artists we liked and didn’t like, and what making a difference feels like.

What is the most difficult part of your job?

I really enjoyed wrestling with this question. We talked about some differences between freelancing and being employed and I pulled together a short list of things which challenge me as a freelancer:

Finding interesting work
Getting fairly and promptly paid
Getting stuff to stick
Coping with loneliness

I wonder if you recognise and experience any of these yourself?

Would you encourage young people to do what you do?

Yes – if you are curious and if you can foster a genuine interest in other people.

There were loads more questions – and some lovely unexpected twists and turns too. At one point I passed round some of my art, including a piece titled ‘Sten Guns in Knightsbridge’.

A discussion ensued about the colours in the flag, and other changes I’d made to the design, and the questions asked took us off in all kinds of unexpected directions. There was a real buzz of curiosity in the room – that was a lovely thing to experience.

A few days before this career talk, Carole and I had visited Keira’s school for parent’s evening, and the thing that stood out to us both among all the feedback we received, was how much the teachers appreciated and encouraged curiosity in Keira. I often experience a lack of curiosity in the world of work, which seems to be driven by assumptions that ‘someone else knows best’ and ‘it’s not safe to speak up around here’. A few weeks into one of the first jobs I had as an office junior, I was called into the MDs office and told that I was asking too many questions about things that weren’t my job, and that I was to stop and simply do as I was instructed. I left that job shortly after, and while I don’t recall experiencing such direct instructions to stop being curious since then, encouraging genuine curiosity is definitely something we continue to struggle with at work.

Curiouser and curiouser…

Whose Talent Is It Anyway?

Talent: Natural aptitude
A qualification: A pass of an examination or an official completion of a course, especially one conferring status as a recognised practitioner of a profession or activity.
Skill: The ability to do something well.
Attitude: A way of thinking and feeling about something.

Employers say that talent, skills and attitude matter, yet the recruitment process is heavily biased towards qualifications. Does a degree in maths, science, history or English provide you with the communication, negotiation and interpersonal skills required to usefully make your way through today’s and tomorrow’s workplace? Not necessarily. Solving the puzzle of youth unemployment is a big challenge, in part because people leave formal education without the vital skills the workplace is looking for.

I recently attended London’s Skilled Future Conference – where among other things, we were updated on ‘The Learning to Work’ programme, led by the CIPD to promote the role of employers in reducing youth unemployment. The CIPD’s purpose is to champion better work and working lives, which starts with young people being able to access the labour market. I’m a big fan of Learning to Work, and even though it is working, this dilemma of requiring talent, skills and attitude, while hiring on qualifications, came up in conference, both during presentations and in conversations at break time. Can we do anything differently?

Coincidentally, a couple of days after attending the conference, I spotted this neat idea. Penguin Random House UK want to invest in, and nurture creative talent, and to this end they have created ‘The Scheme’; a possible solution to hiring based on potential not education. There’s no mention of qualifications that I can see, and as well as being a creative way to hire, the positions last 13 months, initially at least.

And that’s fine because work is becoming much more fluid – the notion of jobs for life has all but faded from view. I think that’s a good thing, and in support of this I believe continuous professional development (CPD) and learning has to become more fluid, and more devolved too. As lifelong learners, I think we need a far greater say in setting the agenda for our own development, to include acquiring and honing new skills which motivate us and may also equip us to work better. With this greater personal influence, I think we also need to take more responsibility for keeping ourselves professionally relevant, partly through engaging with our own CPD, and recording it better than I, and perhaps you, currently do.

On April 29th I will be heading to Changeboard’s Future Talent HR Conference, where the challenge of developing talent, skills and attitude will continue to be addressed. If you are going along too, I hope to see you there, maybe we can talk about this some more?

Until then, I have a few questions for you.

Given the increasingly fluid nature of work, what does talent management need to look like in the world of HR and Learning & Development Professionals?
Are the people with the budget and the influence willing to devolve more money and time to the individual, without necessarily seeing a long term return?
In future, who should take responsibility for encouraging and developing a well qualified, skilled and talented workforce?

Whose Talent is it Anyway?