I was recently invited to the Training Journal (TJ) Summer Conference in London to hear from the winners of last year’s Training Journal Awards.
Personally, I love to hear the winner’s stories and the TJ summer conference provides a great insight into the magical ingredients needed to bake the cake of success in the world of Learning & Development.
The TJ summer conference not only gave the opportunity for the winners to showcase themselves, it gave inspiration to the potential winners of this year’s awards and valuable guidance on what was needed to turn a good training story into a great one.
Now as we know, success is measured in inches and the differences between good and great cannot always be seen with the untrained eye. I wanted to understand from the event whether this recipe for success existed and how easy it is to follow.
I was lucky to have a chance meeting with Chris Robinson during the event and he would help me answer this question Chris is the Managing Director at Boost Marketing Ltd, an award entry writing organisation that specialises in turning good award entries into great ones.
"hang on I hear you say, there are organisations who write awards for people, isn’t this cheating?"
Not at all, like anything in this world there is a technique to writing award entries and PR companies have been doing this for years. ran a number of workshops during the conference which detailed not only the key criteria for successful award entries but the formula that should be followed when these entries are submitted.
I found these sessions incredibly insightful and I wanted to share a few of the key points Chris made.
This first slide clearly shows that winning awards is more than just a story.
Great Presentation
So how do you make your entry stand out? The slide (although difficult to see the entire content), shows the same great story entered twice in different years.
The first entry was not even shortlisted for an award however, the following year is was the winner. Same story different result, so what made the difference? The answer is that it captivated the judge and made it easy for them to skim through the entry whilst being able to recognise the key facts.
The use of clever layout, pictures and graphs all play their part.
Why is this important? Quite amazingly, after you have spent hours, days or weeks creating the best showcase the training world has ever seen, a judge is likely to spend just 5 minutes reviewing your entry. If they are not turned on, they are switched off and onto the next one. Food for thought!
Evidence
Chris also explained how the validation of your claims are also vital to success. The slide below gives a good indication as to structure this.
Firstly, the need to demonstrate the innovation that makes your story great, then how the learning objectives were achieved and ultimately the strategic objectives and how they have positively affected the business.
So in short, if it’s written well, well-presented and the claims are validated, you are onto a winner and who doesn’t want to be recognised for doing a great job?
Do you have a story to tell?
I would like to thank all of the award winners who were kind enough to share best practice at the TJ summer conference. Alongside the inspirational sessions that Chris Robinson from Boost Marketing ran, the event really opened my eyes up to the finesse needed to turn good into great.
There is still time to get our entry in for this year’s Training Journal awards. The deadline is 5pm on the 8th July.
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