Why We Do Kaizen Skooling Sessions

For content marketing specialists, speaking at events is an opportunity to share our knowledge and overcome those public speaking jitters.

Back in March, we gave each member of Kaizen, who had yet to speak publicly, the opportunity to conduct a Lightning Talk in the Pecha Kucha (PKN) style.

“PechaKucha (Japanese: ぺちゃくちゃ, IPA: [petɕa kɯ̥tɕa],^[1]chit-chat) is a storytelling format, where a presenter shows 20 slides for 20 seconds of commentary each (6 minutes and 40 seconds total).”

This was a mini-conference where each person could speak on any topic of their choice – work-related or not. Following the PKN-style, we each had 15 slides with every slide timed at 20 seconds each.

So why do we continue to do Kaizen Skooling sessions?

From brands jumping on the ethical bandwagon to understanding our target audience, the team spoke about a number of topics that helped to increase confidence and break down any nervousness.

Not only do we do Kaizen Skooling sessions for confidence benefits, but we also conduct them on a weekly to bi-weekly basis to ensure each person in the agency understands the roles and responsibilities of different team members.

Our agency has grown quite a bit recently. In fact, over the past few months, we’ve brought in 7 new recruits across our 3 main departments; content, production and PR. Growth is an exciting time for any business. At Kaizen, we want to be sure that as we get bigger, a general level of understanding of what we do, why we do it and how we deliver it is known across every team.

Here are a few sessions we’ve conducted so far:

Why you should consider an internal training calendar:

• It’ll increase your team’s confidence. This isn’t limited to public speaking. Confidence to voice their ideas in brainstorming sessions, speaking with clients and becoming more confident with how the agency works.
• A chance to learn. Continuous improvement is at the heart of Kaizen. We believe that we should be advancing our understanding at any given opportunity. These sessions are short and will give members of the team, who might not necessarily be exposed to the same workstreams, insight.
• Friday downtime. The 20-minute training sessions are a good way to break up the week. Draw Friday to a close on a high!
• Team building. Last but not least – we’ve found that teamwork does make the dream work. Culture is a big focus for us. Bringing everyone together to learn helps us to understand more about how we all tick!

Do you run similar internal training sessions? We’d love to hear how!