Today is the first day of the 2-day exhibition in the London Olympia called Learning Technologies, which for the past 10 years I have been attending either the conference or the exhibition. 
This is the 2nd year actually exhibiting at the event, which came about because I became very frustrated with the learning industry for not including good gamification practises. Most learning design and learning management systems companies now claim they use gamification, which tends to be merely a sprinkling of points, badges and leaderboard, without the user analysis nor links to business objectives and no solid game psychology and behavioural thinking behind it. Our aim is to showcase some of the great work we have done in the past number of years and to dispel the horrible myth that adding random game mechanics without proper reasoning, will do anything good for you.
We don’t have the sales and marketing engines that some of the people have going to these events, but from last year we know that attending the event will mean something in the eyes of decision makers of companies buying services like ours. I remember have very solid good conversations last year with a constant stream of interest, the biggest worry people had was to understand how the process worked and in quite a few cases, the visitors wanted to verify that what they had been told at other stands was actually true. Often unfortunately, we burst the bubble of the lies.
Learning Technologies is also a celebration of our recent new clients. We are delighted to announce we are working on some amazing projects with Qinetiq, Civil Service Education and British American Tobacco. Each of these clients have very specific needs, and allow us to delve into their employee base and design an engagement strategy for learning and performance management adapted to their situations, knowledge levels and objectives.
We are using the event to pre-launch my next book “Tapping into the crowd – gaining competitive advantage from the inside out“, which can now be pre-ordered from the publisher. Each chapter is summarised by a cartoon drawn by Nigel Sutherland, who was fab to work with. I wrote the book to draw the attention of decision makers to including employees in the decision making process for new ideas and improvements. I give some examples of the way I have achieved it with organisations and how the new paradigm of thinking is shifting away from a central decision point to more autonomous working units with their own decision authority. Drop by our stand to collect your postcard with a chapter cartoon to lift a little more of the lid on the books content.
We are also re-launching our online community “The Nation”, which believe it or not has been in existence for 2 years. It includes courses, groups, forums and a 2 mastermind programs. One on learner engagement and the other on employee engagement. Both programs include general citizenship of ‘The Nation” as well as monthly webinars and a dedicated group. Because of the regular requests from a number of people, we are also adding an online mentoring option into the mix for those who want expert input, but don’t have a bespoke budget or want to actually carry out the work themselves. Currently the time we have the 2-D version available, but in the next few weeks the 3-D version will come alive too with the help of the fabulous people at Edorble. More about that when it happens.
If you have a chance to drop by, we are at stand S16, the exhibition is free to attend, you can also follow the happenings online with #LT2017. We would love to see you!
