The Commission for Employment and Skills was a chief recommendation of the Leitch Review and starts work in April. Humphries is tasked with securing a highly skilled workforce for the UK, increasing employment levels, and encouraging more people from disadvantaged backgrounds into the workforce. In the opening keynote of the day he will outline the plans ahead and their impact on L&D professionals.

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There's a lot of talk about the benefits of coaching, but what does excellent coaching look like? This session, which includes a live coaching session on a volunteer's real life work issue, will explore the components of coaching excellence so that attendees can set their sights on its achievement for their organisations.

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Social learning is a new way of defining and providing development opportunities. In an interactive session, Caroline Prendergast, defines and explains the idea, shows how social learning can lead to effective long-term learning and shares some experiences and case studies.

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What differentiates an 'ordinary' trainer from an 'exceptional' one? It's a unique combination of style, flair, talent, content and delivery. In this session, Tony Bray shares some of the secrets he believes can transform a competent trainer into an exceptional one.

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This session will give you an insight into how to use cartoon drawing to enhance learning. A quick sketch will often get a point across easily - and make it memorable. In this lively session you will discover skills you may never have known you had and make a start on using techniques that can be applied in numerous situations.

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Organisations are like living beings - they live, breathe and need sustaining in order to grow and develop. In this entertaining and lively session, Lex McKee compares successful organisations with the characteristics of healthy living organisms, showing what these organisations can do to create working environments and cultures that are a great place for employees to invest their lives in.

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In this entertaining and thought-provoking seminar, Dr Mike Clayton, author of the regular Training Journal column, Super Models, will show you how integrating models into your training and coaching practice can enhance participants' learning and your flexibility as a coach or trainer.

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Thinking is the most important life skill for individuals, businesses and society. However, like literacy and numeracy, it is a skill that needs to be learnt to be effective. This session explores how anyone can use lateral thinking tools systematically to generate completely new ideas that haven't been considered before.

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This year TJ has joined forces with the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) in a ground-breaking research project to explore the future of learning and development. This session presents a fascinating look at the opportunities open to workplace learning and what learning professionals should do to start preparing for a brave new world of work.

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A lack of cultural awareness can have many levels of impact on a business - from an employee's embarrassing faux pas to a failed international assignment or a lost deal. Drawing on a series of real-life case studies this interactive session shows how cultural awareness training enables organisations to become more culturally competent when working internationally

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Occasionally we encounter people in the training room who seem to have just one purpose being there; to wind you up. In this entertaining session Garry Platt will use Transactional Analysis (TA) to look at the purpose and intention of 'game playing' and how the trainer can constructively and positively deal with it.

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This session brings together some of the winners of last year's TJ Awards who will be sharing the stories behind their award winning entries; the problems they were trying to solve and the hiccups encountered along the way.

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One of the biggest strategic challenges of anyone in L&D today is measuring the impact they have on the business. Drawing on the experience of other organisations, this session explores the challenges and provides practical ideas for measuring the value of learning.

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The commercial value of psychological well-being means it should be a key part of your organisation's priorities. Studies have shown that 22 per cent of variance in job performance is accounted for by well-being related factors. The fact is, it's not a nice-to-have but a must-have. In his closing address Binna Kandola will talk about the specific factors that affect individual happiness, how to identify problems and how to use the science of positive psychology to engineer the conditions that will help your people feel better about themselves and their work.

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