Henry Ford is credited as once saying: “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.” Now, we’re not suggesting that ongoing training and development is some kind of elixir for youth, but it is true that you should never stop learning: professional development should be an ongoing process throughout your career. In this blog, we look at why you might want to put it in your New Year’s resolutions for 2019. 

Professional development can help...

At Cranfield School of Management we have recently refreshed our popular portfolio of general management programmes to meet clients’ changing needs. Watch the video below as Camilla Jonsson, General Management Portfolio Director, describes the recent changes...

Cranfield School of Management, a pioneer in executive education for over 40 years, has recently refreshed its popular portfolio of general management programmes to reflect the learning priorities of client organisations and potential participants today.

Camilla Jonsson, General Management Portfolio Director, describes how Cranfield has shaped its general management portfolio to meet clients’ changing needs...

Crises happen. Organisations might like to wish that they didn’t, but the reality is that the unexpected has an unhappy knack of occurring.

A recent tracker report by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) focused on the level of preparedness for Brexit by organisations.

Dr Robina Chatham reflects on how she lost sight of the importance of people skills...

My career commenced within the shipbuilding industry. It was the early '80s and I joined a shipyard along with nine other engineering graduates. I spent the first two years on the shop floor as a ‘fitter's mate’ in order to complete my training to become a chartered engineer. During this time I learned little about engineering but a lot about people, industrial relations and shop floor survival tactics.

Dr Robina Chatham considers how to get the most out of your IT staff...

Many years ago, as an analyst programmer, I remember being taught to differentiate between 'customer' wants and needs. The latter were to be addressed, but the former were to receive a polite rejection. But as I have grown older and wiser, and thanks also to my training in psychology, I now understand that wants have an emotional element, and if they are not addressed they can lead to grumpy, dissatisfied and potentially...

Do you and your colleagues know when to delegate? Dr Robina Chatham suggests some strategies...

My background is in IT, and I have found the vast majority of IT managers are poor at delegation. I suspect this is also the case in other fields, not because such managers are bad people, but because they do not believe that anyone else can do the job as well as they can. This results in a reluctance to let go or a tendency to micro-manage.

Dr Toby Thompson, Networked Learning Director in the Learning Design and Innovation group at Cranfield University, explains how he, along with Cranfield’s engineering and manufacturing experts, delivers an entirely online engineering post-graduate course, the first of its kind in the UK.