News
Five minutes with: Colin Boldra
1 September, 2011
Inside DeakinPrime
Colin Boldra, Alliance Director
Colin Boldra is an Alliance Director at DeakinPrime. As the lead for DeakinPrime in Canberra, Colin has established and sustained the DMO Alliance, a pivotal partnership mid-way through its 10-year term. He has also recently co-authored a report on best practices in continuing professional development, consulted to the Canadian Department of Defence and established a long-term leadership partnership with one of Australia's largest defence contractors.
What is your role at DeakinPrime?
I'm called an Alliance Director. That is effectively an individual who works with our clients to solve their problems.
And what unique qualities do you think you bring to this role?
I work with a range of different clients including both the Federal Government and private sector and the problems that these organisations come to me with … Basically what I bring to the team and DeakinPrime is a very good understanding of 'the whole'.
What has been one of the most challenging roles that you've had during your time at DeakinPrime?
It's still a challenge … and that is getting learning and development professionals to think more holistically.
The challenge that a lot of people are presented with today is that (the) leadership (team) will ask for a learning and development solution. They will pre-define that this is what is required within the organisation, when there may actually be something else in play. It may be an environmental factor or it may be a systems factor.
So … we need to allow the conversation to be more broad, rather than coming to a learning and development professional within an organisation and saying, 'Give me a training needs analysis!' It could be a simple matter of changing the term to 'performance needs analysis', which allows the leader and the learning and development professional to have a much more encompassing conversation.
I think the other big challenge at the moment is acknowledging the informal learning that's occurring, and capturing it and measuring it.
Do you think the future of learning is changing?
Yes, but not the process of learning. Learning is done by individuals in various different ways depending on their learning preferences and styles. However, how organisations learn and how individuals (within organisations) learn is certainly changing.
We have so much technology at our fingertips these days it's almost impossible to keep up with the ‘latest and greatest'. The networked individual is really the successful individual.
And network theory says that there are two types of networkers within an organisation: the person who get things done from a subject matter expertise perspective, and the one that gets things done through other people. In today's organisations, we need to have a balance of both to be a very effective organisation.
The (new) learning strategies for that sort of modern organisation are completely different from those of traditional organisations. Traditional hierarchies are just not allowing this kind of interconnectedness to occur. And the freedom of being able to source the right information at the right time is not being provided. So, the learning environment is changing quite dramatically and is based on social networking outside the traditional hierarchy.
How important is work–life balance to you?
Work–life balance is important for me and indeed for a lot of the people I work with. My family — I value them immensely.
How do you achieve it? I think the only way to achieve it is by making a conscious agreement with yourself about what you're going to commit to and what you're going to be able to deliver on to all the parties you're working with.
