Interview with Nigel Jeremy

Citation

(2006), "Interview with Nigel Jeremy", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2006.08120baf.002

Interview with Nigel Jeremy

Interview with Nigel Jeremy

Nigel Jeremy is a senior manager with extensive experience in the fields of leadership development and organization capability in several blue-chip environments. He currently works as Head of Learning and Capability Development for Vodafone UK.

What is the most influential book you have read and why?

There’s a book called Running Training Like a Business by Adelsberg and Trolley. What I particularly like about that book is that it translates the flesh of learning and development to business language. It’s about evaluation and why it’s so hard some times to get senior managers and leaders within your own business to buy in. I found it a very real book in terms of real world businesses with lots of opportunities to apply it to the workplace.

What attracted you to working in this field?

Like a lot of my colleagues I just kind of fell into it as a happy accident. Originally I was a bank manager and one day my HR Director visited my office and suggested he thought I might have a career in learning and development so I relocated to Bristol at that point and started working as a training consultant. Within three weeks of starting as a training consultant I knew that’s what I really wanted to do. It’s a hugely positive role because all you are trying to do is help people be better at what they do, there’s no downside to learning and development as a vocation.

What do you see as the biggest challenge in your current role?

I think the challenge is to deal with the complexity of HR issues. As the world is becoming more complex I’m finding HR issues generally are moving and becoming more complex. You have to keep five or six plates spinning simultaneously for your organisation so it’s not just about having the best set of courses in the world it’s about having courses that match to the performance management system, succession planning and so on. There are five or six key things that you always have to keep pulling levers on. When I started learning and development it was two or three things maybe. The hardest bit is keeping all the plates spinning simultaneously.

In your opinion what are the biggest obstacles to effective learning and development in organizations?

In any business these days that has got a shareholding the pressure is on in terms of costs and one of the first things that is looked at in my experience when a company is looking to reduce its cost base is HR and Marketing as that’s where some big numbers are. There’s a constant challenge to hold on to your money. The money gives you choice and there’s a direct correlation between money and budget particularly in the field of management and leadership development. The second obstacle is time. People work very hard and they tend to work long hours. It’s hard to convince the population to move away from their working environment for half a day, a day or sometimes even three days. It’s not a question of desire to do it, but the real world and that a job has to be done. Often when you’re away no one is doing your work for you. Employment society has moved to look like this over recent years with people having to play catch up on their return to work. This is a barrier to learning as it leaves you with a stark choice to make.

Who would you consider to be the key influencers in the field?

If I had to put down two or three individuals it would have to be some of the long-standing theorists. Kirkpatrick in terms of evaluation has had a huge influence on the industry. There are some general theories out there from when I started like Maslow’s theory of motivation and Hertzbergs’s theory of motivation, Freud and Briggs and Myers. For me those types of individuals who wrote the foundation of a lot of psychological and development theory many years ago, I think much of what they say still holds true. Very often even today what you get sometimes when new books are coming out is repackaging with a spin on a lot of the work that has been done previously.

Where do you see development and learning in organizations in say, ten years’ time?

I see a shift to manager lead learning. I have colleagues in other different industries who also work towards the same cause. Learning managed by the individual with the support of their manager, I think that’s where the future really lies. I don’t think the future is in e-learning. I think e-learning is a part of the solution, but I think the industry has got itself caught up in a bit of a spiral with e-learning over the last 15 years. A lot of money has been invested in that subject, but there are only a few examples of where it has worked well. Where it has worked well has always been as a part of a blend with other methodologies. What I see is a greater focus on the manager and employee relationship being the source of the development not a central learning and development department providing as many answers as it can.

Are learning and development issues attracting the attention they deserve in organizations today?

In my industry they are in the sense of the management and leadership development issues. I wonder sometimes if the more junior level development issues that are more functionally specific reach the radar screen of the more senior members of organizations like the board. In my experience board’s are interested in performance management issues, how they are going to develop managers, succession planning and how they are going to develop their leaders. They are probably less interested in knowing heavily and making decisions about how they are going to train X, Y and Z person who has just joined the organization at the most junior level. I think they trust the organization lower down to make that happen.

What is the key corporate event in your calendar this year?

Being given the option to speak at the CIPD conference like I am today is one of the biggest gigs you can have as a learning and development professional. I’m really delighted to be doing that today. Internally, I think the biggest corporate event I will attend and be part of will be the annual leadership update. This is where we get the top 100 people in our business together, the leadership population from the UK, and talk about results strategy and where we take our business to over the next twelve months. That’s a critical piece for us because that does for people like me is to put a context around what I’m doing during over the year.