Building fun into learning at LEGOLAND® Windsor: CIPD Festival of Work
Employee training is far too important to play around with it. Or is it? According to Zoe Roberts, Senior Learning and Development Manager at LEGOLAND® Windsor, that’s precisely what you need to do. If your workforce is tasked with helping customers to enjoy themselves, the training should capture that fun too.
You can experience Zoe’s fun-filled approach to training at the CIPD Festival of Work conference and exhibition at Olympia, London. On 13 June, as part of the free learning on offer at the exhibition, Zoe’s presentation with Nimble Elearning is at 10am on the Learning and Development Stage.
Upon joining the organisation, Zoe found a significant training need was to address the retention of seasonal staff. Here’s what Zoe decided to do: “We started by looking at where the magic begins, our induction programme. It’s where we needed to win the hearts and minds of our new seasonal staff. We are all about FUN. It’s one of our values, we live and breathe it in our roles and it is demonstrated by our colleagues. We decided to make our goal to inject fun into our induction programme so new employees encountered it from day one.”
Zoe replaced the existing PowerPoint slides, which had provoked a passive response in the past, with elearning courses. A major factor in her choice to adopt Nimble was because of its ease of speedy and professional authoring. Her implementation objectives were:
- The need for a streamlined and efficient department
- The importance of fun
- A blended approach to ensure consistency of message
- Collaborative approaches with resort departments and the Merlin global team.
The collaboration factor was important for Zoe too. She began by consulting with LEGOLAND® and the global Merlin organisation to identify key messages. Her next step was to find fun ways to build engagement with those messages. A process that sounds to us just like how you’d use LEGO® bricks.
As Zoe points out, “Lots of people are intrigued as to what lies behind the fun, glitzy world of theme parks. They want to know what challenges are involved in order to make that happen. LEGOLAND® is one of the ‘must see’ theme parks in the UK and this seminar will offer insights into our operational challenges from an L&D perspective.”
There will also be opportunities to talk with the Nimble team about how to build great engagement into your training, just like Zoe – but without needing a theme park to do it.
CIPD Festival of Work: https://www.festivalofwork.com/free-learning/