Some of you will have caught a glimpse of The Apprentice on television. The show where “future tycoons” compete for Alan’s heart.

For me the title is the most misrepresentative item of the show. An apprentice at least hints at the willingness to learn and grow into a role or organisation. The competitors display an arrogance and boast knowledge and skills that suggests they know everything about business that there is to offer.

I know the show is highly edited and we don’t get a glimpse of the learning that occurs from week to week, but there is something about certain contestants’ lack of self awareness that amazes me. They were clearly chosen for TV rather than future leadership prospects.

In this show displaying weakness is an open door to be mob-attacked and outed by the other team members. Clever leaders have a support network of mentors, colleagues, friends and family who they can trust and who will provide support and feedback. I hope some of the contestants at least have this outlet of help between the emotional beating they take every week.

That said I can’t stop watching it it. It’s entertaining, provides excellent material for training, and is a talking point in offices across the nation every Thursday morning!

Over the past year or two the social networking phenomena has built at an incredible pace. Some businesses are beginning to see its potential whilst others see it as another way for lazy employees to avoid getting down to real work. What most commentators seem to agree on is that the ‘young’ are the real masters of social networking and will be the ones who bring it fully into the mainstream as they enter work.
I came across this article the other day that gives an insight to how social networking is entering the mainstream of business life. It will be interesting to see how it starts to impact on learning.

Most of us work with Psychological Type regularly, through the MBTI.

JCA are developing a new Type tool and method and are running a short free seminar on it next week. They are focusing on how to translate Type results into personal change, and will introduce their materials and show the product in practice.

It sounds as if it could be interesting to go along and find out more about how it might fit with our programmes and with their other tools such as ie+ (which I wrote about recently).

The seminar is on Thursday 7 Feb from 17:00 - 18:30 followed by drinks, at the JCA offices in Cheltenham. For more info contact Claire Bott at JCA on claire@jca.biz , or have a look at their website http://www.jca.biz/.

We are all about experiential learning - giving people real experiences to learn from rather than just the theory. And we need a huge range of experiences to draw upon so we can make these fit the specific needs of the client organisation and the people coming on programmes.

Necessity is often the mother of invention, and quite rightly too, as every situation is different and we also pride ourselves on designing bespoke programmes.

But we have to work hard at being creative and sometimes the process needs some priming, so we’re going to have a 2-day event with our associate facilitators to come up with new tasks that we can bring to bear on the sorts of issues our clients are facing.

Another very positive spin-from this is that it will build our own team. We work hard on our team. Like many in the market we rely on a lot of freelancers, but unlike many, we invest heavily in building a genuine team from these freelancers - consistency is very important. So, whereas our everyday work often means we work alone and meet infrequently, this workshop will help to keep us all engaged with each other and moving forward together.