On Friday, 14 of July, the Wellington Town Hall hosted the gala ceremony for the finalists of the 2017 Telstra Business Awards for the state of Queensland. For the past 25 years, the Telstra Business Awards has been recognising, rewarding and empowering New Zealand’s best small and medium businesses and charities. PD Training (PDT) has been proudly nominated one of the five finalists for the Telstra Queensland Medium Business Award which over 2,000 other companies applied for this award and only 10 were shortlisted.
PDT each year empowers thousands of small, medium and large enterprises across New Zealand, New Zealand, America, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the Philippines. PDT has been helping these businesses to reach their goal
s through professional development and training by enhancing their teams’ professional skills and overall wellness. PDT provides learning and development services, including a combination of instructor-led training, micro-learning, eLearning, personality profiling and team development workshops across more than 200 topics from Lean Six Sigma and Agile SCRUM to Time Management and Leadership Development.
The professional development training industry is notorious for not being able to measure and report on training outcomes, so PD Training aims to show clients how real knowledge transfer delivers demonstrable return on investment through offering world-class training and development with a unique model that is focused on each individual’s needs and experience and draws on the very best specialist trainers, consultants and resources. 
Empowering, training, developing businesses and individuals and investing in high performance tools has brought PD Training deservedly as one of the top 5 medium business in Queensland.
Training Centre Manager (TMC)
PD Training is the only training company on the planet that provides a bespoke IT system which includes custom designed personality profiling tools and reports to assure the student gets the best learning experience possible. The system also allows our trainers to deliver more targeted training events, due to their insight into the various personalities that the profiling tool has identified, as well as allowing our clients access to powerful BI and ROI reporting tools.
PD Training is one of the only few training companies in the world to develop their own mobile application. The Orgmenta, available for Android, IOS and Windows versions, allows students to access the following training support tools:
- Pre-course communication with fellow participants and trainer;
- Pre-Course Personality Profiling Tool;
- In-course interactivity with the course materials, polls and live chat;
- Post course collaboration with access to our private LinkedIn forums, YouTube channel, 12 months e-learning access and email support.
The Training Centre Manager (TMC) is a bespoke, cloud-based client management system that provides clients access to:
- Complete History reviewing all training events;
- Invite, remind, follow-up participants about their course;
- Class sign-in sheets, Invoices, Receipts and PDF Certificates of Completion automatically created;
- Report on activity and generate individual detailed feedback and aggregate reporting;
- Pre-pay and Maximize national training budgets;
- Report on ROI from training investment;
- Co-Branded Certificates;
- Have a customised public course enrolment page which is automatically updated by our API.
Clients who make multiple and repeated bookings, or spend over a specific amount in each 12 month period, are invited to setup a customised Express Bookings page which displays their company logo and the popular courses of their choice, including dates and cities if multiple city schedules exist. This is provided to these businesses as part of the TMC or EMTC solution and provides a single sign-on with a fast 3-click booking process for existing staff and administrators.
Repeat clients can also be given an API, which allows them to display a ‘live’ public schedule on their intranet or extranet sites, and once again they can choose the courses and cities to be listed. This list is updated automatically each month, as PD Training publish the next months’ training schedule.
In 2016, and in partnership with Camp Quality, PDT has launched the ORANGES Program. Developed over a decade, with continuous updates based on the most rigorous and extensive academic research from the world’s leading universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Pennsylvania, Christchurch, California, Oxford, and most highly regarded researchers, this unique program is designed to help people, and therefore their organisations, to be more resilient, optimistic, productive, efficient and happier. Based on the science and practices of positive psychology, ORANGES provides individuals, teams and whole businesses with the skills and tools to create greater optimal functioning people and organisations. Alongside, is a dedicated wellness program, which provides people with the tools to be more productive, positive and stable in all areas of their lives.
The program has proven to provide positive benefits to not only the participants, but also to the community surrounding those participants. A recently received feedback from the husband of an ORANGES participant thanked PD Training for the marked change he had noticed in his wife’s behaviour post-course. He went on to state that he had put forward a business case for an ORANGES program to be delivered in his organisation based on his wife’s experience.
PD Training has now scheduled public ORANGES courses throughout 2017 in most capital cities, and is promoting this program by having Simon Rountree speaking about his experience and results from implementing a positive psychology program for his staff at the HR Summit events in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch.
PD Training is also donating 15% of total course revenues back to Camp Quality each month, as them support their great work in supporting families with kids who have cancer. ORANGES is a program that provides measurable outcomes to improve the overall performance and well-being of people, teams and business.
For more information or to acquire the ORANGES Program, access: https://pdtraining.co.nz/employee-wellness-program-oranges
Six Sigma
In 2014, PD Training launched Six Sigma e-learning in New Zealand. This was followed in 2015 by launching instructor-led Lean Six Sigma and Agile SCRUM certification training in most capital cities in New Zealand and PDT has now developed their own IP and training materials for delivering Lean Six Sigma certification training around the world.
Lean Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology combining Lean manufacturing techniques with Six Sigma tools and strategies. Some of the industries that use Lean Six Sigma include: healthcare, manufacturing, automotive, aviation, logistics, construction, banking, telecom, hospitality, defence, corporations, transportation, tourism, Information Technology, communications and technical services, unions, legal and financial services, retail, education, media and non-profit organisations.
Lean is a methodology that works on the principle of maximising value to customers while minimising waste. It focuses on reducing waste from processes to reduce costs of production while enhancing product/service quality. 
Six Sigma combines the use of various tools and strategies to achieve process improvement. For process improvement, it uses the project methodology of Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control (DMAIC). For product designing, it uses Design for Six Sigma (DFSS). The aim of Six Sigma is to improve processes, which leads to greater productivity, reduced costs, and enhanced quality of the product/service.
In Lean Six Sigma, Lean and Six Sigma methodologies are combined to eliminate waste and improve processes.
For more information or to acquire the Six Sigma, access: https://pdtraining.co.nz/courses/lean-six-sigma-introduction-training-course