FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

No you don’t have to but there are advantages if you do, as you will learn more through sharing with your peers. You will also feel more connected as there are regular, motivating get-togethers to discuss content and its application in the workplace in different organisations

If there is sufficient interest in starting up another study group, this can be arranged, just let me know. For example the Organisation Development study group ran in October 2020 and ran again in the Spring 2021.

You have access for one calendar year.

1-2 months, based on 1-2 hours study per week.

You can join or start a discussion in the Academy Forums. Of course, if you are part of a study group this is an ideal place to ask questions and discuss points based on content in the course or your broader experience.

In a nutshell, yes and it can be downloaded and printed, or uploaded to your favourite social sites e.g. LinkedIn.

Twelve courses will be up and running by Autumn 2021, marking the end of the first operating year of the Academy. After this, Jon will be in a position to widen the offering and may be interested in design collaborations.

This course is more conceptual / less practical than our other courses and in many ways, acts as an optional foundation for these other programs. Competitive Advantage is therefore priced to reflect this status.

To make this pricing possible, the course is provided to run independently from the Academy’s study groups. Instead of this, the course has its own ‘study forum’ allowing participants to ask questions, review other people’s answers and to comment on these.

Most of the Academy’s content is pre-recorded or similarly provided, and most of the Q&A and discussion is asynchronous too. So you can do most of your learning at the time and place which is most suitable for you. This means that you can join from anywhere in the world, and the Academy already includes members from many different countries, from New Zealand through to the West coast of the USA.

However, you might need to know that we use Vimeo to host lesson recordings. Vimeo is banned in China (including Hong Kong); North Korea; Iran; Cuba and Indonesia. And the USA State Department forbids Vimeo from doing business in Sudan and Syria. Therefore, if you are in one of these countries, you would need another means for viewing these videos (using a VPN; accessing when travelling; etc).

Slightly less importantly, we use Zoom for synchronous meetings supporting study groups, and for broader Happy Hour discussions. These are the countries we believe currently ban Zoom (you will have better information than us): Belarus; Burundi; Central African Republic; Cuba; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Iran; Iraq; Lebanon; Libya; Mali; Nicaragua; North Korea; Pakistan; Somalia; Sudan and Darfur; South Sudan; Syria; Venezuela; Yemen; Zimbabwe. If you are in one of these countries, we would still encourage you to join the Academy (assuming you can access Vimeo somehow) as we can look at using Microsoft Teams, Skype, Google Meet, etc, instead.

Similarly, we will try to arrange study group Zoom calls to meet the needs of all group participants in different time zones. However, this may still mean some relatively early starts or late nights, and sometimes we may just need to have one or more individual calls and share the archives of these calls in the group

These are really important aspects of effective HR and they are referred to as critical enablers in many of the topics / courses in the Academy. Jon is, in fact, one of HR Executive’s global Top HR Tech Influencers (2019 and 2020) and speaks regularly at leading HR technology conferences around the world.

Technology is also a particularly important focus of both the Digital Transformation and the Workplace Design courses. However, if you want more focus on technology, we recommend Josh Bersin’s academy.

Similarly, Analytics is a particular focus of the Strategic Partnering course. However, the focus here is definitely on strategic vs operational analytics which does not necessarily help us act strategically, and will largely be replaced by AI soon anyway. However, if you want more focus on analytics, we recommend AIHR.

However, if you want to understand opportunities in Strategic HR, including the role of technology and analytics within this, then you are in the right place!