MyKnowledgeMap

CMI Pathways to Management and Leadership

Background: In 2006, MyKnowledgeMap won the contract to develop an entirely new set of e-learning materials for the Chartered Management Institute, the UK’s only chartered professional body dedicated to management and leadership.

We were commissioned to develop e-learning content for the CMI’s Diploma in Management course, Pathways to Management and Leadership designed around the CMI’s management competency framework. It addresses all of the major skill areas required to perform competently as a manager in the private or public sector.

Primary Aim: To produce and launch the CMI’s Diploma in Management course, Pathways to Management and Leadership as 51 separate interactive and custom-friendly e-learning courses.

Key Challenges:

To provide custom-friendly, flexible, moment-of-need, bite-size e-learning for leaders and managers whose available learning time is limited.

Solution:

MyKnowledgeMap has created 51 management and leadership courses, each one ranging from between 30 minutes to 4 ½ hours to complete. The learning is highly interactive, and offers many opportunities for individuals to reflect on what they are learning.

The courses consist of a combination of e-learning, engaging activities and assessments. They focus on maximising potential by assisting in developing knowledge and understanding of the most fundamental skills in management and leadership, and how to put this learning into practice in the workplace and job-role.

They are structured in a way that facilitates mix and match or moment-of-need learning by allowing the learner to select whichever course they feel will meet their requirements at any given time. The great advantage of this flexible bite-sized learning is that it can be conveniently slotted into the busy day-to-day routine without encroaching too significantly on the learner’s time.

Above: A sample of the CMI e-learning

The unique feature of this course is the way that tutors and trainers can customise and contextualise all of the learning content. The learning is developed in a custom friendly format, so that any images can be modified, additional text can be added to supplement the core learning, and topics can be rearranged and recompiled into new courses.

The CMI material can be customised by the delivering organisation to suit a particular organisation or industry subsector. The custom-friendly architecture that we use to build our e-learning means that you can swap in industry-specific images and content to make the learning relevant to a particular group of learners.

The tool that CMI tutors will use to contextualise e-learning is Compendle, MyKnowledgeMap’s standalone desktop application for compiling and customising e‑learning courses. Compendle is designed with the needs of non-technical trainers in mind: it allows people to structure courses however they feel comfortable—over a set number of weeks, for example, or into an entirely new modular structure.

One of the major advantages of using Compendle for the CMI is that it allows them to custom-brand their courses to suit particular employers.

For more information about Compendle, please see www.customcourse.com. A demonstration version is available for download from www.customcourse.com/downloads/

If the courses are taken as part of the Really Managing service, the online skills diagnostics system Capability Matrix can be employed to identify skills gaps by measuring skills and targeting learning where it’s needed most.

The courses can be bought instantly online or accessed through the Really Managing service. They are also available on CD-Rom and can be easily installed on a Learning Management System or intranet (delivered as a SCORM package).