Interview series - Growing Professionals Graham Owens

In a career spanning the globe, Graham Owens is currently living in Qatar in the Middle East working in an L&D function within global operations in a Qatar gas – Pre-Covid they worked an 80/20 blended learning an approach which was working them, but most L&D always wanted a more online course.

Since Covid happened, they broke down some barriers by working online and had to pivot very quickly with the teams' help internally to ask how they would like to learn now. Bringing in external people to help in the business they produced lots of different online styles and switched the focus entirely online.

They have completed more courses than they had delivered on the previous year by 20%, which helped us deliver projects more efficiently.

Graham learnt how open people were to engage in online learning was surprising when we asked the head of the business to do more online now that conversation changed as soon as we had to change. This now helped us within the L&D to be more creative in how we had to deliver the training and doing things are different and fully engaged.

What's been learnt is that the time cost and effort to travel around the world to do 1 - 4 days of training, hotels entertainment is not necessary. We would like to see a 50/50 split going forward as the employees know the benefit of how powerful doing more of the workshops, learning.

We should see the holy grail of the blended approach which is very powerful to the employees and will see a more engaging the workforce that will help the people learn and grow further.