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According to LinkedIn’s “2018 Workplace Learning Trends Report” the workforce agrees, training for soft skills is the #1 priority with the pace of change fueling demand for adaptable, critical thinkers, communicators, and leaders.

It’s widely recognised that soft skills are harder to learn and to teach. The reason is that over a lifetime work, habits and attitudes become ingrained. Developing new soft skills involves changing attitudes, work philosophy and overcome personal character flaws.

Irish Times Training has been delivering trusted, current, expert soft skills training for over 40 years. Our high satisfaction rate speaks for itself with 98% of course participants saying they would recommend our courses. Our proven approach to soft skills training is based on an immersive classroom learning environment that encourages participants to implement what is learnt in the classroom and to engage with both expert trainers and peers.

Our 2019 programme addresses some of the challenges of the future workforce faced in organisations today with a number of new soft skills programmes added to our growing suite of public courses.

Coaching for Performance

Creating an environment and a culture where people can thrive is essential to creating and sustaining success in an employee landscape that is seeking less of a ‘job for life’, and more meaning, purpose and engagement than ever before.

As a result, more and more organisations are adopting coaching style management disciplines. The reason why this management style delivers such incredible results can, to a large extent, be credited to the fact that it is hugely based on investing in people and people are every organisation’s biggest asset.

As well as directly encouraging personal development, good coaching has a proven record of impacting companies positively with “more creative ideas”, “more motivated staff” and “improved relationships” listed amongst the benefits by John Whitmore in his book ‘Coaching for Performance’ (2009).

Our 2-day Coaching for Performance programme will deliver insights on how to coach, the skill-sets needed, the do’s and don’ts of coaching and explain why organisations committed to talent development are adopting coaching style management disciplines.

Agile Project Management with Scrum

One of the four major trends identified by Forbes as affecting the future workforce is a shift in business model with clear movement towards reducing complexity and building agile business processes uniquely customisable to customer needs. Organisations need to have or develop the capacity to evolve (often quickly) to set trends or respond to forces that are changing the market.

According to a January 2018 article in McKinsey Quarterly, “The urgency imperative places a premium on agility: it enables the shift to emergent strategy, while unleashing your people so they can reshape your business in real time. It’s also a powerful means of minimizing confusion and complexity in our world of rapid-fire digital communications where everyone can talk with everyone else—and will, gumming up the works if you don’t have a sensible set of operating norms in place. Agility is also the ideal way to integrate the power of machine-made decisions, which are going to become increasingly important to your fundamental decision system.”

This requires organisations to shift focus inside out and demonstrate leadership by example around integration, innovation and inclusion.

The most popular Agile Project Management approach is Scrum. Scrum is an Agile framework that provides a set of tools and artefacts to create a structure that enables project teams to focus their innovation and creativity in solving what might otherwise be insurmountable challenges. Scrum supports our needs at work: to belong, to learn, to do, to create and be creative, to grow, to improve and to interact with other people, utilising the innate traits and characteristics in people to allow them to accomplish great things together.

Our 2-day Agile Project Management programme will enable you to adapt and respond to emerging project challenges using the Scrum approach with help of expert tuition and guidance.

Handling Difficult Conversations

“… if we build a culture of feedback, then we can open the door for otherwise challenging conversations to become normative. When organisations embrace this, staff understand that feedback isn’t an attack, but an opportunity for ongoing improvement.” [Forbes, 13 Ways Managers Can Initiate Tough Conversations With Employees]

Few leaders relish sharing difficult messages. Fears about what to say, how to deal with other people’s responses and concern for the individuals impacted can knock even an experienced leader’s confidence.

The good news is that you are not alone. Our 1-day Handling Difficult Conversations course will feature a combination of trainer led tuition, case study review, role-play and peer group discussion. It will equip you with a better understanding of how to deliver the message, appreciate the use of empathy and ensure you identify the necessary skills to secure better outcomes from difficult conversations.

All Courses

In addition to the new courses highlighted above, we continue to offer a range of public courses in Management, Sales, Digital Marketing, Communication & Interpersonal Skills as well as our Executive Education and Springboard+ programmes in partnership with Ulster University. Visit our Course Finder for a complete listing of our public courses.

Have a number of people you would like to train in a specific area? All our public courses can be delivered on a Tailor-Made basis offering choice, value and the opportunity to tailor learning solutions to meet your organisational needs.