Hi all,

My boss has handed me the task of finding a Soft Skills company or consultant to come in and help our staff with various soft skills such as presentations, communications, time management, etc. Does anyone have any recommendations of vendors that they have worked with in the past?

Thank you,
Rachel

Where are you located, Rachel? Are you looking for in-house options only? Do you want to spend time/money on customizations? ...just a few questions to get started with trying to truly identify your need so I can point you in the right direction. The more information you can provide about the size of your organization, the needs analysis your boss did to conclude that those were training needs, your location, your company goals, etc., the more apt the suggestions of vendors will be...

Hi, thanks for your help.
We are located in NYC. Our organization is very large (over 10,000) but I'm only looking for training for our department staff. In-house would probably work best for us since we have a staff of about 30 and wouldn't be able to send them all to training. Our needs are soft skills in the areas of communication skills, presentation skills, problem analysis skills, time management skills for IT staff. If the training could be somewhat customized to suit our needs, that would be great. Your help is appreciated.

Rachel,

You might consider exploring Acheive Global as an alternative. They can deliver the training for you or you can "train-the-trainer" and then follow their process and use their curricula.

Solid stuff!

quote:

Do you want to spend time/money on customizations?

The longer I am in this industry (20 years now), the more I come to the conclusion that if the training is not customized, and is not all tied together with a common underlying theory of learning, or an underlying psychological theory - so that learners are hit from all sides with training that is coherent and internally consistent in philosophy - that training will ultimately fail - and that this lack of customization and consistent underlying theory is primarily to blame.

Learners today are barraged with individual courses, i.e., as in this case, communication, problem analysis, time management, etc., that do not relate to one another in theory. There really needs to be some underlying theory so that learners can more easily relate the "pieces," or courses, to the whole - their total training experiences.

For example, if the same psychological theory underlies the communication skills, team building, decision making, and every other soft skills course, learners will be able to use the info and tactics in each course more efficiently and effectively because there will be a core commonality to the whole thing - a common language. Learners will eventually be able to apply the underlying theory all by themselves to whatever the problem may be - or so it seems to me.

At any rate, I think all training should be customized to the particular needs of the company, and their specific objectives. I know the common argument is made that it is often too expensive and would take too long to customize every course. But, do you really believe anything else will be much of a success in the long run?