5^th April 2014

Nitin Sanker

The last quarter for Middle Earth has been very exciting and  memorable. We ventured into Iran for the first time with a program for Sanofi . The program was done by our Dubai based faculty Hawa Charfaray and was very well received.  We also signed up a new business partner for Oman and Qatar which extended our business footprint into the Middle East further.  We expect that we would be adding quite few programs to our existing Middle East programs specifically in Qatar and Doha.

On the program front, of the three new programs launched last year the Certified  HR Analytics and Metrics Professional certification – aptly nicknamed CHAMP; received a very large number of enquiries from all over Asia and become one of the best sellers in our 14 certification pantheon.

Professionally we also welcomed our new Associate Director Srividya Jayaraman who has 15 years of experience, nine of which were with a single IT firm where she rose to be the head of HR. She also has an extensive training experience. Srividya is not new to us as she has been done a licensiate with our educational wing in the past. Besides Srividya, we also have had an occasion to welcome three new research fellows to strengthen our research wing.  We have had our usual quota of employee engagement activities and training programs internally which was well received by the entire team.

An important milestone was the reframing of our value framework after more than 10 years. The new framework has been now developed  into 4 core values.

Learn – A key aspect of Middle Earth is that we are a learning oriented organization. Our products are all learning products and have been winning many laurels for the quality of of the training programs we run , we also hope to  provide an extraordinary learning environment to our internal stakeholders who are our team members.

Grow  – Our external stakeholders  are provided with powerful practical learning through projects and this practical learning helps them grow in their career, we also hope to provide a strong growth environment for our internal team members through a well planned talent management system and growth through a mapped competency framework.

Celebrate – We hope to appreciate all our hardworking participants with a constant celebration of their achievements in our events and publicizing their projects in our knowledge center. We also hope to have an appreciative culture of our internal team members , constantly appreciative of each other efforts.

Transcend – The final value is our belief that we want all our stakeholders whether internal or external to reach a level of quality  that is the very  best that they can be. And then to reach a level of quality  providing a “wow” impact on their customers.

One of the highlights of our Events division was the starting of a new format of events which are the Forums – the Forum is a 3 hour format event which serves to update participants about the latest trends in various verticals of HR. We started with a forum for Chief learning officers (called the CLO forum) in Bangalore and Hyderabad . Both the events went of very well with around 70 participants in each of the events, we had heads of learning and development from varied organizations like Schneider Electric, Tech Mahindra, Facebook, Mind Tree, HP, Biocon, HCL, Grant Thornton, NMIMS, ISB and other leading corporates participating both as attendees and as panel speakers .

So all in all, it was a memorable and good quarter for us,  I am personally looking forward to the next quarter ..