Developing and rewarding soft skills is crucial to achieving cultural change in which public services are enablers rather than providers and the public is a co-producer rather than recipient

Hundreds of senior civil servants are being trained in how to handle the consequences of the spending cuts and while there's plenty of inspiration it's clear austerity can hurt

E-development means training remains high on council's agenda, says Pete Bennett from the Learning and Skills Network

Employee engagement is hard to categorise and even harder to implement, but when an organisation does recognise the value of its staff it can only lead to better performances and outcomes

Employee engagement is vital to maintaining standards in public services but fewer than 20% of managers have training in engagement skills

Senior leaders should take the lead on employee engagement - for the sake of the organisation, write Ian Ley and Julia Hockey

Innovation will be vital over the coming years to ensure public services can achieve more with less, but how ready is the public sector to be innovative?

Faced with the prospect of budget cuts and belt-tightening measures, public sector employees will be feeling anxious and apprehensive. Martin Addison of Video Arts says managers have a duty to be as open and honest as they can about what the future holds

In a big organisation finding out what is actually spent on training budgets can be difficult to track, that is why managed learning services can help rein in costs and obtain discounts for clients

Predicting the future is virtually impossible, and mankind is no further on than the days of the Delphic oracle. What we need is not a 'lens of now thinking' but strategies put in place to cope for potentially unforeseen situations

Leaders in both sectors are now faced with a myriad of challenges, so what tools can be used to keep the customer and staff satisfied?

Stephen Brookes considers the role of academics in helping define a new public leadership to help today's managers change with the times

Outplacement services providers could benefit from large-scale public sector lay-offs. What do they provide, how much do they charge and how should they be handled?

Ministerial responsibility means long hours and never switching off, so how can they be expected to take time out to learn valuable self-improvement and leadership skills? Keep courses short and relevant to their jobs - and catch them early

The hierarchical structure maybe alive and well in traditional organisations, but it is no longer regarded as an effective way to run a company. The best leaders and most modern prefer a more egalitarian climate

Training can have a motivational impact in difficult times but a new study from KnowledgePool claims that a quarter of all training fails to yield a significant performance improvement

A leadership course run in the north-east not only trains up participants, but then asks them to become mentors and coaches for others that follow their lead

When a group of NHS chief executives enrolled on a summer camp they discovered ways to improve their own wellbeing and by sharing problems learned valuable lessons in how to lead without becoming stressed

John Cleese discusses the benefits of using comedy in training courses