Training = Biz Dev..?

Since getting back to the UK, I have been doing some upskilling.

I identified a couple of key areas where I felt I wanted to improve my practice (primarily related to hands-on experience of participatory facilitation techniques), signed up for a few interesting courses (a fairly corporate facilitation skills class which was better than I expected, and – more directly relevant to the development sector, an excellent 3-day workshop on Participatory Action Research with Dan Buckles and am spending a week at the start of March in India at the Praxis annual commune on participatory methods with Professor Robert Chambers, which I a quite excited about!), not to mention a few other workshops, learning meetups etc.

Now all of these were undertaken strictly for my own learning and professional development.

But I just got an email from Action Aid about some potential work.  It may or may not lead anywhere, but it that made me reflect on the fact that – from the PAR training alone, I ended up doing some work with Dan Buckles, discussing some potential future work with CRS and now Action Aid, and there were a couple other interesting conversations during the training that could lead on to work-related opportunities.

Now don’t get me wrong – I am not suggesting anyone go on training courses as a sales vehicle – it would be tacky in the extreme!

But I do feel a bit better about shelling out the money for courses knowing that, not only does it make me (hopefully!) more able to contribute in the sector, but there is a chance it may end up bringing in work to pay for itself.

Hmm, maybe I best look for some more courses! 😉