Jordan Cohen, a Business Analyst with the Capability Group, played for the Black Sticks men’s hockey team at the recent Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Here’s his reflections on an incredible experience.

Recently Drew McGuire from Capability Group hosted a webinar to discuss existing and new approaches to onboarding in a hybrid world. It was a fascinating conversation packed with insights and practical tips to improve your organisation’s onboarding process

I’ve dreamed of playing for New Zealand ever since I was little. I didn’t really care what sport it was. I just wanted to make it to the top.

Difficult customers have always been a challenge but since COVID-19 first reared its head back in March 2020, frontline employees have increasingly had to deal with upset, angry and sometimes downright abusive customers, both in-person and over the phone.

Singapore organisations have a fight on their hands to attract and hold on to the region’s best and brightest.

Even before Covid-19, Australian companies were concerned about their ability to retain and replace key staff. Since the start of the pandemic, the ‘war for talent’ has escalated with huge demand for skilled workers in certain sectors and a shortage of suitably qualified candidates.

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it," is a quote attributed to Peter Drucker, the man who invented modern business management. For far too long, measuring the impact of learning has been an exception to this rule.

The starting point with any L&D programme is to correctly diagnose and understand the pain points in your business you want to positively impact. That allows you to design a learner journey to address those particular challenges.

Using technology platforms to deliver learning across organisations is commonplace today. Now they can also help quantify a programme’s value and commercial impact if you know what solutions to look for.

The demands placed on learning and development teams amid the pandemic have sharply increased. Organisations are attempting to mobilise skills to keep pace with a rapidly changing market, and at the same time, many are raising the alarm given severe talent shortages.

As the pandemic disruption of the workforce slowly evolves around the world it has become clear that the hybrid model is here to stay.

The pace of change and the requirement for learning and development teams to be agile and adaptive is not going to go away.

As much of Australia and New Zealand is in the midst of further lockdowns we find ourselves again forced into a remote working environment. One that we are more familiar with and more equipped for than in our first experience in March 2020.

A 2021 US future workforce survey of more than 200 HR leaders(conducted by Lyra Health, Boston University and Future Workplace) identifies the following top 5 strategic priorities for 2021.

The learning landscape has changed drastically. The implementation of new technologies and ideologies surrounding learning has swept through corporates and academia alike, with the demand for more accessible (and useful) learning experiences surpassing the ability to provide them for many.

A training platform based on the latest science on what constitutes effective learning is set to help boost both the skills and confidence of management and key workers in the aged care sectors in Australia and New Zealand.

Aged care operators face a number of challenges amid rising demand for their services in the next decade. The providers that will lead during this time of substantial change will be those who can attract employees, train them on the job and retain workers long-term by offering clear paths to career development and job security.

Join our #ReimagineLearningImpact series from June 2nd to answer this question and many more. The series will support you to harness the power of technology and data to make better decisions in designing and developing learning experiences for your entire organisation. Global thought leaders will provide you with tips, tactics and stories that you will be able to incorporate into your learning strategies for the remainder of 2021 and beyond. We are looking forward to connecting with you all!

The challenge for frontline employees starting a new role is significant as they are expected to quickly be able to perform in customer-facing roles. According to Aberdeen Group, new employees are 69% more likely to stay longer than three years if they experience well-structured onboarding.

The pandemic has accelerated digital disruption in the retail banking industry to a level not previously seen. Here are 4 key takeaways from Axonify’s recent Axonicom Fireside Webinar.

Why Immersive VR is so effective for soft skills development and the positive impact psychological safety has on a teams’ performance, engagement and innovation.

Eighty percent of the global workforce is on the front line. Disruption may have changed the way they do their jobs, but they remain the ultimate driver of business success, and we should invest in their development.

As New Zealand enters the second round of restrictions, many of us will also be cycling through familiar feelings of anxiety, and stress.

We can easily get focused on trying to be productive with the practical tasks we face, like managing cash flow, retaining and winning customers, innovating and pivoting. However, we often forget to allow focus on the 3 most critical things that can support this productivity.

We hope you were able to make use of our free Lockdown Field Guide animation series over the past 6 weeks, either individually, amongst your friends and family, or across your organisations. We have received incredible feedback and each animation has received 1000’s of views so we hope they played a small positive role in maintaining wellbeing throughout lockdown.

Capability Group is further bolstering its commitment to innovation in the digital and learning technology space with the appointment of Simon Carter, our new Product Design Manager - Digital Learning & VR.

In March the world is celebrating International Women’s Day and this has generated a bit of buzz in the office here at Capability Group.

Capability Group’s team in Singapore continues to grow as we expand our offering across the SEA region. We are hugely excited to introduce you to the latest member of our Singapore team, Belinda Ng, Head of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development (SEA).

Capability Group has established a Singapore-based Advisory Board to support its expansion across the SEA region. Following a robust recruitment process with support from NZTE and Board Dynamics we are really excited to announce the following two appointments.

What does ‘personalised’ mean to you? Is it your name etched onto the back of your smartphone? Is it a website that suggests additional products based on what’s in your cart? Is it a video game that automatically adjusts the difficulty as you play?

As the pace of change in our business environment has accelerated, organisations have become increasingly more dependant on the adaptive capabilities of their teams.

March 25, 2020 brought about a sudden and sobering reality for the team at Briscoe Group Limited. Like many companies around the world, they were required to close their 85 homeware and sporting goods stores across New Zealand as the nation entered a level four lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recently we partnered with a significant Australian retailer to help transition their frontline staff from face to face learning to learning online. This blog looks at how we were able to solve their learning challenge by successfully utilising Capability Group’s learning design principles to provide effective blended learning solutions.

In the 21st century, we are presented with a landscape that is interconnected and global. Any organisation now has the ability to be available any time, any place, to anyone. The advent of this interconnected, global marketplace provides an incredible opportunity to those companies willing to move with the times, and part of this is the ability to appreciate the importance of diversity as well as inclusion in the workplace.

One thing that people often complain about in the workplace is boring meetings. If you were to ask people to rank what frustrates them most about work, I predict that poorly run meetings would rank somewhere near the top.

Keeping your team motivated through tough times can be challenging, and with the pace of work only increasing and disruption & change becoming the norm, the task of keeping our people motivated and engaged in the workplace can seem daunting.

In our VUCA world building a more diverse and inclusive workforce is a strategic imperative of most organisations across the APAC region.

The Growing Pasifika Niu Leaders programme is a programme specifically designed for Pasifika employees who have demonstrated leadership capability and potential but not necessarily in the traditional workplace sense.

Capability Group is delighted to announce a partnership with workforce upskilling platform Degreed.

In 2019, almost all of us have had experience working in a virtual team – a 2018 global study of executives from major organisations found that 89% of respondents work on a virtual team, and 27% are on at least four virtual teams.

I recently re-read an awesome book called First, Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham & Kurt Coffman.

We’ve been having lots of conversations here at Capability Group about who we are, why we do what we do and the impact we want to have. As a result of these conversations, we made an interesting observation. Our solutions not only transform individuals, teams, and organisational performance, they also generate a ripple effect, causing the connections and capabilities developed by individuals on our programmes or using our solutions to flow through into their families and communities.

A logo, a website and a bunch of fairly “corporate speak” language to define who we are and what we do… surely that’s all you need in a company like ours?