When we have established the management skills the participants lack, a series of skills workshops will be designed.  The likely subjects are presentation skills, team working skills, interpersonal and leadership skills, time management, chairing meetings etc.

NEW KNOWLEDGE WORKSHOPS

One of ICOM’s competitive advantages is its ability to deliver workshops which blend knowledge of general management theory and practice, with current insights in the “technical” areas of the client’s business.  For example, when teaching operational management we will have inputs at three levels.  First, we cover the explicit knowledge about operations management in general terms, usually backed-up by selected reading material.  Second, we will have face-to-face presentations by an expert in operations in the client’s industry, be it ports, electricity generation, hospitality management, for example.  Third, we get the client’s “operations director” to define what they think are the key issues for the business.  In addition, we get external “expert witnesses” to come and present.  In this way, we examine the most stimulating theory and practice, together with current insights into the client’s business and the regional and global contexts in which they operate.

Our approach is not based on a general management toolkit.  It is about giving participants an understanding of the literature, the confidence to question theoretical approaches and, above all, the skills to achieve an effective transfer of learning from the classroom to the workplace.  That is, our approach to teaching and learning is based on creating an environment where learning comes from engagement, from taking appropriate action following reading, listening to, presentation, debating issues and then applying the learning to the participants own “real world agenda” in their own workplaces.  That is, their job is the main “laboratory of learning”.

This approach of using “technical” experts in the client’s own business contributes significantly to establishing a partnership with the client which is at the heart of the customised, action learning approach taken by ICOM.  The faculty’s success in doing this, based on delivering 65 such programmes throughout the world, lies in their ability to understand the client’s business and the needs of its managers, their ability to design programmes which match these needs and the changing needs of their business.  This is a collaborative, partnering process which develops during the programme and often results in suing our action learning approach to tackle other problems in the business.

The detail of how we design the workshops and their technical content may be seen in the descriptions of our programmes in electricity, telecoms, ports and construction, described in the section on infrastructure programmes.