In order to continue to thrive, we believe we need to have the very best people contributing to the business. This means not only attracting the best, but continuing to develop our staff throughout their time with us. We are committed to helping you enjoy work and further your career with us through offering the highest quality learning and development opportunities.

Our Learning and Development team work hard to develop a range of courses and other learning interventions to suit the range of development needs of our staff. Sometimes these are led by experts in-house, sometimes we bring in specialist providers. Each year, you’ll agree a development plan with your manager to cover both areas necessary for your role and those in which you have a particular personal interest.

This approach starts with induction, where we offer a two-day session which takes you right through the book-making process from start to finish, so you get a good feel for the group as a whole. You’ll then have the chance to meet our CEO at a quarterly breakfast meeting for new joiners. And finally, you’ll sit down with one of our HR team who will guide you through all the information you need.

Read on to find out about some of the recent training and development activities at the Random House Group.

Digital PR Training
In order to keep up with developments in the digital publishing world, including use of the internet for publicity campaigns, we ran 3 Digital PR training sessions over the summer of 2007. These sessions were attended by staff from our Digital team and Publicity and Marketing departments across all of our companies and imprints.

Negotiation Skills for Sales
Our Key Account Managers manage our important negotiations with the retailers and wholesalers to ensure that Random House titles reach as many end customers as possible. To help them reach their full potential in these roles, Scotwork (global specialists in Negotiation Skills training) were commissioned to deliver a 2 ½ day Negotiating Skills programme for our client facing people.

RHCB Managers Training Programme
8 of our Random House Children’s Books Managers went through a comprehensive training programme in 2007, involving personality profiling using a self-assessment tool and two 2-day highly practical and interactive workshops on Interpersonal and Management Skills. The training programme provided RHCB Managers with tools and techniques to enable them to develop a personal action plan for application of learning back at work. RHCB Heads of Department attended Coaching Skills workshops so they were able to adopt a coaching approach with the Managers and help them review and practically apply their personal action plans to their everyday roles.

Professional Study
Random House Group support individuals (both financially and in terms of study leave) who wish to undertake professional post-graduate study. Many of our financial analysts are studying for their CIMA or ACCA qualifications and within HR, we support staff in working towards their CIPD qualification.

Continuous Improvement Training