Here we are in May - April gone in a flash! It was a busy month for clients, projects and everything else L&D here at Interaction.

April highlight has to have been presenting at the ISE Student Development Conference. It was great to meet so many early talent focused professionals face to face – still a novelty and a privilege after the ‘Covid wilderness years’. So many thought-provoking sessions covering the latest ISE Development Survey, AI, generational trends, and the changing learning landscape.

But cutting through all of this it felt like THE topic of the day was ‘business readiness’ – or the lack of it! We say this of course with a transparent element of bias, but also because it felt like wherever we turned ‘business readiness’ was singing out loud and clear.

According to the 2024 ISE Student Development survey, half of employers said that their graduates are not career ready at the point of hire, with similarly high numbers for school and college leavers. The data suggests that early careers are starting out without all the skills that they need to navigate today’s hybrid workplace successfully.

Our session ‘Ready. Set. Grow’ was all about empowering early-career professionals to hit the ground running and be ‘business ready’. This is not just about understanding the dos and don’ts of working in organisations, but critically it’s about the organisations themselves creating a psychologically safe environment. Why? Because this encourages young people and their managers to open up and share their expectations of each other and ‘speak the same language’. They start off on the right foot and importantly the same foot.

There are many different elements to this which we explored in our session and also covered in some free resources to help people understand not just the WHY but the HOW.

For us, ‘business readiness’ as a training focus is something we’re passionate about so if you want to learn more on how we can help your graduates, apprentices and early talent then we’d love to hear from you.

So until the next ISE Conference … Ready. Set. Grow!