My second day at the PPMA Conference began with a Legal Update session. Thinking about the topic and my late evening the night before, I thought that this would be a challenging session to get through first thing in the morning. I was wrong. Employment Law Barrister Stuart Chamberlain was informative and entertaining as he brought the delegates up to speed on the latest legislative and case-law developments. Listening to the cases, I was struck by how similar our two legal systems are. There were some differences in wage and hour and discrimination law, but there were distinct similarities that made the presentation easy for me to follow.
Continuing with the Conference's theme of leadership development, the next session was conducted by Professor Beverly Alimo-Metcalf of Bradford University. Her topic was "The Public Sector Skills Challenge for the Next Decade." The themes of her presentation were about the motivation and development of leaders and how government agencies can organize themselves better to motivate and manage change. Similarly to day one, there were a series of break out sessions held in two workstreams. I attended sessions on aligning organization development and business requirements to respond to the changing public sector delivery landscape and creativity and skills development master class. The master class session was very interesting as it purpose was to teach participants how to use story telling to further the change and development in your organization.
The last speaker of the day was Richard Gerver, former lead education advisor to Tony Blair. Richard was an incredibly engaging and passionate speaker. He spoke on the topic of creativity and innovation in human development. His command of the stage and passionate delivery was a perfect bookend to Dr. Dennis Kimbro's opening session. Mr. Gerver challenged the delegates to take risks and get out of our comfort zone. He took the full 90 minutes for his presentation, and I can speak for everyone in the room that we would have listened for another 90 minutes.
The evening concluded with the PPMA Annual Recruitment Awards and Gala Dinner. This black tie event (yes, I did say black tie...) is hard to describe. It is a formal awards evening with music, master of ceremonies, and video presentations. The awards portion was hosted by British author and comedienne Sandi Toksvig. Her clever humor was hysterically funny. Fortunately she only poked fun at Americans a few times. The purpose of the gala dinner is to recognize excellence in 17 categories related to recruitment advertising. The overall winner of recruitment work of the year was the British Antarctic Survey, who ran a series of print, television, and on-line employment advertisements.
I know that this experience has not fully sunk in yet, but I want to thank all the wonderful people at PPMA that I have met over the past 3 days. Particular thanks needs to be given to PPMA Executive Director John Tonks and PPMA President Dean Shoesmith. They both went over and above to make me feel welcome at this conference.
I also want to thank IPMA-HR, Executive Director Neil Reichenburg, and IPMA-HR President Maggie Whelan for granting me this opportunity. I was glad that I was able to share this experience with Maggie who travelled to the conference with her husband Tom.
Looking back, I am so glad that I approached Dean Shoesmith 2 years ago in Las Vegas to discuss his experiences with shared services. To quote Dennis Kimbro, "Sometimes its risky not to take a risk."
See you back in the States.
Bill
