Learning and development comes about by countless activities. We are continuously learning by having conversations, watching films, reading books, attending meetings, observing people, watching our children play and so on. When we look for the learning and take the time to reflect on what we have noticed we are consciously developing all the time.

Sometimes we need to find a route that can accelerate learning about a certain subject or skill. You can do this through a number of planned activities such as coaching, mentoring, shadowing, project work, challenging assignments, secondment, resources such as books or the internet, action learning teams and workshops. Any one of these routes could answer your development need. But everyone learns in a slightly different way and a mixture of all of these approaches is most likely to be the ideal route.

We have built a number of programmes available across Smiths Group that aim to bring some, if not all of these learning approaches together. You will find that each has a workshop element that is packaged with pre, post and sometimes interim work with references to useful web sites, learning materials and where possible encourages the support of a coaching or mentoring relationship. For this reason we do not position these experiences as 1,2 or 3 day courses but as programmes that run over a period of 2-3 months depending on the subject and surrounding activity.