1 Developing yourself and your organisation

Professional development of staff is core to any profession, its quality and support defines an organisation. This course has been developing your own skills and capabilities in tricky topics and learning design. If you want to ensure that your organisation benefits from this work, it is important to start sharing your learning appropriately with your colleagues and develop their skills. Then, together you can support your organisation to put in mechanisms to enable ongoing learning and development.

To develop your colleagues and then your organisation it is pertinent to understand what knowledge they already have and how they need to progress. This requires the creation of communities that share and develop good practice whilst not judging individuals for their lack of expertise in some areas.

Therefore, by developing your skills and capabilities in tricky topics through this course, you can become a ‘champion’ and a leader in your organisation for tricky topics and learning design. It might be useful to think through your own role in your organisation and how to work with others to enable taking this championing role forwards. One approach to leading here would be to clearly identify, for your organisation, what it is you want people to follow. For example:

• How have you adapted the tricky topic and learning design approaches so they are more applicable to your organisation?
• What are the clear messages you need colleagues to take away on this?
• How are you going to communicate those messages to colleagues?
• How are you going to create momentum in your organisation and keep that momentum going?

A good way to start is to show-case your own learning journey through this course to your colleagues and to highlight what advances you’ve made. You can also agree to mentor colleagues in their own developmental journeys. Recognition for completing excellent work, such as teaching awards, is another way of developing your colleagues and your organisation. It is worth also looking at online information on mentoring and coaching.

The aim would be to start a tricky topics movement in your organisation. Activity 1 should give you some ideas about starting a movement.