Communications training Canberra

With more years of experience than we can count, we love to share our knowledge with you. We run training for communications in person in Canberra and online.

Our training focuses on creating a supportive learning environment, empowering participants to improve their professional skills, and equipping them with the confidence they need. A live, interactive training session will provide participants with in-the-moment feedback and coaching, enabling them to hone the skills they learn during the session and embed the practice.

Our training sessions can be customised for your team of 4 to 40 in-house, or keep an eye on our LinkedIn page for our public events. We currently offer:

Communication strategy

Get heard. Make impact – The art and science of strategic communications 

Are you trying to be heard? Amplify your impact? Secure more grants and funding? Get more people to use your services? To do that, you need a communications strategy. 

Our interactive training session is designed to meet everyone where they are and empower you with the skills and knowledge you need to craft a compelling plan.  

During this session, you will:

• learn the basics of communication strategy development (or a great reminder)
• dive deeper into your operating environment and audiences
• map out how to reach the hard-to-reach and consider how you will measure success.

You will have access to an experienced team of communications professionals and will walk away with a communications strategy ready to be implemented.

Our training is $750 per person plus GST for the full day session, or $75 per person if you work in a not for profit.

This workshop really opened up how important planned communication is to sharing our mission! When you have a lot to share it’s really easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of communication. Being able to have the space to plan out how, (and why) we’re sharing our story made me feel like reaching our audience is a really possibility, rather than a distant goal.

– Participant, May 2024

Engaging with influence

No, this is not another course to teach you how to meet the APS work-level standards. This is for everyone who needs to get out there and talk to the community.

Our training is designed to empower participants with skills to convey their message effectively, even in challenging situations. This interactive program focuses on:

• identifying and sticking to your story
• crafting clear and concise messages, and
• employing techniques to manage a difficult audience.

It’s a bit of media training and a bit of facilitation techniques all rolled into one great engagement skill.

We cover essential strategies for managing your nerves, maintaining composure, and skillfully handling tricky questions and sensitive topics.

You will learn to navigate tough scenarios, including steering passionate or emotional discussions back on track, de-escalating tension, and maintaining control of the conversation. We work through online and face-to-face scenarios that support you to have the tips and tricks to feel confident about talking to the community about your project.

Through a blend of theory and lots and lots of practice, this training equips you with the tools needed to communicate to any audience with confidence and influence.

Writing to engage

Writing effectively is not just a core public service skill—it’s a strategic advantage. As ex-public servants, we know the power of a well-crafted brief or email. The dividends in terms of efficiencies and influence are invaluable.

We’ve also sat through numerous ‘Writing in the APS’ courses. We understand the limitations of that traditional “one and done” approach to training, as we’ve seen everyone return to their desks, swamped with workloads and little opportunity or incentive to practice their new skills.

Ultimately, you need behaviour change that can be sustained over the long term, so we ground our training in a well-researched behaviour change model. The result is an innovative package that, most importantly, drives real change.

The ’COMB’ model is well known in behaviour science as a simple but tested approach to address the core factors that lead to real change. We consider a combination of three key factors: Capability + Motivation + Opportunity to drive sustained behaviour change. We combine these in our training by incorporating a capability uplift with activities designed to allow participants to put their skills into practice and the motivation to keep practising.

Behavioural science tells us that if people are involved in creating tools and resources, they will value them more and be more likely to use them. So, we incorporate a co-design element to our training that produces tailored tools that participants can take away to embed the learning.

Creating influential engagement with internal clients

If you work in a corporate area, you know that the toughest part of your job is dealing with your internal clients – those people in other teams who rely on you to support them.

It’s the reality of life, but when in these roles, we need to find a way to achieve shared outcomes, negotiate difficult challenges, and demonstrate our value to the organisation. This dynamic often presents unique challenges, requiring you to balance your priorities and theirs and ultimately get them to meet their corporate responsibilities.

To be successful, we need to develop the skills to be influential, understand our “audience,” and share our story in a way that develops the behaviours we need to establish.

Designed to provide you with the tools and techniques you need to thrive in this environment and even start to love working with your clients. Whether you’re new to the corporate environment or a seasoned professional, this training will provide you with the skills to:

• move from tactical, reactive delivery to being a strategic advisor
• prepare for meetings and interactions with internal clients
• the principles of influence, active listening and authentic questioning
• take your collaboration game to the next level

With decades of experience working in-house and now running a small business, let us help you develop a customer service mindset while being able to demonstrate the expertise you contribute.

Thank you for today’s session and for sharing insights and intel on how to make us better at what we do. The comprehensive take-outs and reference guide is a considerable volume of work that we covered in such a short space of time. Most enjoyable and very enlightening.

Participant, May 2022

Thanks so much for the session today – it was excellent. Good to step through all of the topics and show it is not that scary! Just reinforces a lot of what we already know we should be doing.

Participant, May 2022