After the NZKM session over lunch, I caught up with Phil Garing, the Managing Director of Synapsys NZ Ltd.

“Synapsys is dedicated to transforming client organisations for superior, consistent performance. We accomplish this through the delivery of training and knowledge management solutions especially tailored to the needs of our clients.“

They have offices in Christchurch and Wellington, with 10 staff between the two offices. About 33% of their work is in competence development, specification of learning solutions, etc. The development side involves some sort of blended learning solutions, eg, across print, web, face-to-face. About 20% is corporate, and 80% is educational.

“What is learning and development?”, asked I. Phil said that, in essence, it’s about helping organizations learn to transform. The people they deal with usually have an HR or training focus in their roles; they are motivated around recruitment and change management, or about developing a learning culture. They’ll be seeking some support to help them achieve strategic objectives.

Some examples:

• Worked with a financial investment company earlier in the year, and the process involved formulating a learning and development strategy, developing a competency framework, and then building a set of courses to deliver to the competency framework. This then moved into a series of plans and projects to move the business from the current state to the next level.
• Helping professional bodies to develop curriculum and courses for initiating new people into the profession.

Thanks for the introduction Phil!