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What We Do

Using our multi-award-winning methods, we unlock talent in three ways:
01
Learning & Programmes
02
Experiences & Communications
03
Advisory & Insight
CASE STUDIES
01

Learning & Programmes

Need to get results?

We combine the best of behavioural science, human-centred design and creativity to design and deliver award-winning learning and programmes. From onboarding to development programmes; internships to stand-alone skills sessions; and leadership to high performance programmes.

Forget dusty flip-charts and boredom. Think full throttle, immersive and accelerated.

Read our Learning & Programmes Case Studies.

  • Development Programmes

    It’s not easy to win the F1. It’s one place where the design of your car is the difference between winning and losing. We give your programmes the cutting-edge aerodynamics, the slick tyres (and that all-important smooth road beneath them), together with the horsepower, to fly. Whatever your talent programme: students, senior leaders, or anything in between.

    How do we do it?

    First we listen to you and your people. That’s the heart of our human-centred approach. Second, we use our strategic research, our expertise in experience design and our award-winning methodology to design your Programme. Finally, we launch it, evaluating, iterating and learning as we go—what you’d expect of a good pit crew while your car is on the track. Or, if you’d prefer a continued partnership, we can manage your programme end-to-end, too. Helping you deliver on your ambitions is a bigger thrill than crossing the finish line.

    Get in touch to learn more.

  • Onboarding Programmes

    Their new job, their first few weeks … Your opportunity.

    Done well, a strong onboarding can increase productivity by 70%. Done poorly, well, one in four people leave a company in their first 90 days.

    We take a deeply human-centred approach to designing onboarding programmes. The result? Onboarding programmes that help new joiners feel a sense of belonging, from day one. That help them transition into their new role. That equip them with the skills to hit the ground running in their role and then some. That put your culture front and centre.

    Add to that, our onboarding programmes are accelerated, immersive, and sustainable. They can be scaled up and down, deployed modularly, and even adapted for specific regions or business areas.

    Get in touch to learn more.

  • Leadership Programmes

    Some say great leaders are born. We are here to dispel that myth. Great leaders are made. It’s a skill, just like anything else. And with practice, we can all be exceptional people leaders.

    Whether it is your high potential candidates entering the world of leadership, or your senior leaders embracing the future of leadership—we are experts in the science and complex psychology behind how to move to the next level. We’ve worked with leaders in some of the worlds biggest (and smallest organisations) from the CEO down.

    There is no one set formula, but we have a rigorous, innovative, and scientific set of tools that can support your leaders to develop this increasingly critical competency.

    Get in touch to learn more.

  • Global Programmes

    Your business is global, the skills you need are universal. How do you make those skills sing to every individual, wherever they are based and however they like to work?

    Running a global programme can be challenging. What if you could be spared its design and management? What if you had local experts across the globe who can deliver a globally consistent programme in a regionally specific way?

    Whether an Executive Programme, a Graduate Programme, an Internship, Apprenticeship or School Leaver Programme. Leave it to us. We’ve been doing it for years. Some might say we wrote the book on high performance programme design. We know what to do (and not do).

    Get in touch to learn more.

  • Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging

    Attracting diverse talent is just the first step. Authentically harnessing the diversity of your talent is the endgame.

    As part of your overall DEIB strategy, you should be focusing on upskilling your board level quickly. Embedding systems thinking and an inclusive mindset in your senior leaders. Equipping people managers to effectively lead diverse teams. Building a targeted HiPo Development Programme. A standalone programme alongside your assessment. Arming everyone across your business with the tools to nurture an inclusive culture where people can bring their true selves to work.

    Wherever you are in your DEIB journey, our sessions and programmes are immersive and experiential. They use inclusive design to ensure everyone has a space. And, most importantly, they view your people as the experts of their experiences of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging in your organisation.

    Get in touch to learn more.

  • Skills Sessions

    Our Skills Sessions are expertly crafted and feature accelerated learning, tangible takeaways, business relevance, and measurable outputs.

    VIEW OUR FULL SKILLS SUITE

    Our Skills Sessions include:
    + Leading through Change
    + Inclusive Leadership
    + Resilience
    + Anxiety and Wellbeing
    + Dealing with Ambiguity
    + Unlearning
    + Influencing
    + Networking in Hybrid
    + Decision Making

  • Self-led Learning Modules and Nano Learning Content

    Your people crave ownership and control of their destinies, and self-led learning allows them to do so in a structure they can use to play, learn, experiment, and push themselves at their own pace.

    Give your cohorts the power to take charge of their own development by engaging with self-led learning content like nano-videos, learning scrapbooks, or development passports.

    Get in touch to learn more.

  • NEW: The Expedition

    The Expedition is a ready-to-deploy, highly modular end-to-end line manager training solution designed by The Smarty Train to equip your line managers to be effective guides and mentors.

    Whether your line managers are just starting their leadership journey, or whether they’re experienced adventurers looking for a refresh, The Expedition can equip them with the tools they need.

    LEARN MORE ABOUT THE EXPEDITION

CASE STUDIES
02

Experiences & Communications

Launching a new strategy? Communicating your purpose? Deploying a new operating model? Reimagining your induction or attraction journey?

We build transformative experiences designed for maximum recall. Experiences tailored to change how your people think, feel, and do.

This is where our Learning and Advisory come together. The result? Experiences that are sticky, scientific, precise and tailored leave a long-lasting legacy.

Read our Experiences & Communications Case Studies.

  • Induction Design and Delivery

    We turn inductions into productions. We’ve designed award-winning inductions for some of the world’s biggest brands.

    No one gets a second chance to make a first impression. And this first impression needs to set the stage for a quality performance. Whether your aim is to immerse new joiners in the values of your brand, upskill and educate for success, or simply ensure that everyone hits the ground running, your induction should be run like a 5-star production.

    Forget PowerPoint lectures. Drop the one-way conversations. Ditch the waiting and wondering. Create a lasting legacy for your new joiners. We design to ensure that your induction runs seamlessly, your brand receives the spotlight, and your learning sticks. What’s more, as well as designing your induction, we can show you how to run it end-to-end too.

    Get in touch to learn more.

  • Executive Event Design and Delivery

    We don’t do offsite. We do out of this world.

    What if you could get learning recollection from an offsite executive event up by 30%? What about 40%? We’ll help you keep going. Bringing people together should be about learning today and action tomorrow. Using our award-winning toolkit, we’ll help you frame and design your events in a completely new way. One that gets results.

    On call to the CEOs of some of the biggest companies in the world, we promise this: No looking at your iPhone. No missing sessions. No disengagement. We design for stickiness, immersion, and action.

    Get in touch to learn more.

  • Communications

    Launching a new strategy? Operating model? Organisational purpose?

    Whether to your leaders or to your entire workforce, we specialise in communications and culture change programmes that don’t just share something new. They kickstart transformation in your organisation’s very DNA.

    Get in touch to learn more.

CASE STUDIES
03

Advisory & Insight

Need to think about your talent? Borrow our heads.

Maybe you want to rebuild, refine or reimagine. Perhaps you need a deeper understanding of your people. Or you’re looking to future-proof your talent strategy. We cover all the usual acronyms—EVPs, ETPs, DVPs—and then some.

Through rigour, human insight, strategic foresight you’ll get a fit-for-purpose and sustainable solution.

Read our Advisory & Insight Case Studies.

  • NEW: Early Careers Optimiser (ECO)

    The Early Careers Optimiser (ECO) is a diagnostic tool, designed to provide an objective, evidence-based framework for Early Careers leaders to assess current performance and identify opportunities for future optimisation. ECO has been built on extensive research and experience by The Smarty Train over the past fifteen years.

    LEARN MORE ABOUT ECO

  • Strategic Programme Review

    You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been. From attraction to off-boarding, talent programmes can be rife with complexity.

    Our Strategic Programme Review analyses your talent programme’s needs and gaps, provides you with a comprehensive picture of your pathway as it stands, and explores where it could be in the future.

    Get in touch to learn more.

  • Employer Value Proposition (EVP)

    Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

    Employer brands are the heart of the employee experience you build for your people. Great brands reflect their organisation’s values, are authentic, and genuinely listen to their people.

    Our Employment Value Proposition [EVP] construction identifies and articulates the essence of your employer offering; honing your brand into a concept that will keep talent talking.

    From your digital presence to your development, our EVP work explores your strengths, benchmarking your offering against the best of the industry. Whether you’re a benefits base-camp or a development destination; get in touch to find out how we can put the value into your employment proposition.

    Get in touch to learn more.

  • Development Value Proposition (DVP)

    Attract, train and retain; development is the key for success in all three. If you’re in a crowded marketplace, use development to differentiate. If your development offering sits at the heart of your employer brand, articulate it. If you want to keep people engaged and in your business, invest in their development.

    We study each aspect of your development system. We analyse and distil your development brand. And we then provide you with a blueprint for tracking future progress and Return On Investment.

    The outcome is a strong development value proposition that aligns to your business’ strategic aims, meets your stakeholders’ needs, and delivers development when and where it counts.

    Get in touch to learn more.

  • Data Dashboards

    Did you know 57% of time spent making decisions is spent ineffectively? And that data improves decision-making by up to 3 times?

    Also, did you know that by putting supporting data in the previous line, we primed your brain to take our point more seriously? We’re particularly good with the trickier parts of relaying data, such as establishing the measurements and improvement cycles needed to keep your stakeholders informed and improve your decision-making.

    Our secret sauce is a mix of science, persuasive design, and strategic storytelling. Whether you need to relay your successes to Talent Leaders or Recruitment Leaders, we know how to make it stick. And make it look beautiful. We’ve done it for some of the largest organisations in the world.

    Get in touch to learn more.

  • Development Programme Design and Management

    High performance environments need high performance people: now. But that’s not all. They need engaged people, who are aligned to their organisation’s talent strategy and overall vision.

    Our development programmes put your people at their heart, and have your talent strategy as their spine. We craft end-to-end journeys that consider what skills your people need, when and how best these can be delivered.

    Our content ranges from the core professional skills needed today, to the market-leading skills that future-proof your talent. Our modes of delivery are tailored to your organisational culture—from individual to collective learning, directed to self-led, virtual to in-person. And it’s all scalable, modular, and adaptive.

    Human-centred design. Immersive learning. Accelerated delivery. A stand-out combination.

    Find out how you can transform your programme into an experience. Get in touch to learn more.

CASE STUDIES

Case Studies

All
Learning & Programmes
Experiences & Communications
Advisory & Insight
INCLUSIVE UPSKILLING EVENT
Empowering Diverse Audiences

Providing diverse audiences with work-ready soft skills at immersive live learning events

EARLY CAREERS OPTIMISER
Providing a stronger voice

How the Early Careers Optimiser (ECO) affirmed EY's Americas practice as a leader in the development space, giving their Talent Acquisition team a stronger voice in the business.

EARLY CAREERS OPTIMISER
Guiding global decisions

How the Early Careers Optimiser (ECO) helped J&J focus where to spend time and effort to deliver the greatest performance for their global Early Careers.

DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS
Interactive Development Guides

Bespoke digital communications to provide an interactive and self-led structure to EY's brand-new Career Pathways launch.

Line Manager Toolkits

Interactive manager guides to empower line managers to own their relationship with their line reports from the very beginning.

Award-winning
Codifying Strategy

A groundbreaking Early Talent Proposition and development framework for J&J, creating a unified EMEA approach to Early Talent development.

EARLY CAREERS OPTIMISER
Evolving Early Careers

How the Early Careers Optimiser (ECO) helped Experian, a new entrant in the Early Careers space, double the size of its offering and evolve into an established Early Careers function.

GLOBAL INTERNSHIP PROGRAMME
Reimagining Internships

A pioneering collaboration putting industry-leading skills at the forefront of lululemon's brand-new IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, & Action) global internship programme.

Multi-award-winning
Global Skill-Based Initiative

Our partnership with bp saw their traditional virtual campus attraction programme transformed into a pioneering skills-based global attraction initiative.

Award-winning
Redefining Attraction

A global, multi-day, virtual attraction event, designed to take participants on a journey to unlock Johnson & Johnson’s core message and values. ​

DEVELOPMENT PROPOSITION ADVISORY
Formulating Development Strategy

A future-focused strategic advisory partnership, working closely with RMG stakeholders to produce bespoke Development Value Propositions.

Multi-award-winning
Transformative Inductions

A multi-award-winning personalised induction programme, using accelerated learning techniques and high-impact training methods.

D&I LEADERSHIP TRAINING
Changing Perspectives on D&I

TST were charged to change how leaders of one of the biggest luxury organisations in the world think about diversity and inclusion.

BESPOKE SKILLS TRAINING
Bespoke Soft Skills Training

Harrods sought a way to upskill their Brand Partnership team in transferrable skills that would help them think innovatively about relationship building in their roles.

Award-winning
Virtual Inductions

In the throes of Covid, Sky sought a rapid pivot to virtual for their induction programme. Our award-winning solution included learning interventions, key soft skills, and development challenges, all aligned with Sky’s culture.

EXECUTIVE TRAINING
Engaging Executive Audiences

Our partnership with FTI Consulting saw their Managing Director training reimagined into an international diamond heist complete with witnesses.

GLOBAL STRATEGY LAUNCH
Strategy Launch

TST brought new strategy pillars to life in a transformative, fully-gamified experience for the firm's top 150 global talent leaders.

GRADUATE SKILLS
Immersive Skills Sessions

M&S' graduates were transported away from a standard classroom setting into three immersive, experiential learning sessions.

MULTI-MEDIA COMMS STRATEGY
Enabling Transformation

The Smarty Train partnered with AngloAmerican across a number of years through the acquisition and integration of a new subsidiary company.

Award-winning
Boosting Inductee Engagement

We partnered with Clifford Chance to design a high impact induction that would enable trainees to feel integrated, prepared and excited as they transition into the firm.

ASSESSMENT CENTRE ADVISORY
Assessment Advisory

The Bank of England needed a new assessment centre that would better reflect their employer brand.

EXECUTIVE EVENT
Empowering Women in Leadership

UBS sought to accelerate women of the future by uniting their global community and challenging their leaders to be self-aware.

ONBOARDING ADVISORY
Upskilling Internal Teams

A learning design crash course to equip Alter Domus' people with the necessary tools to better onboard their new joiners internally, sustainably boosting speed-to-value for their inductees.

GLOBAL STRATEGY LAUNCH
Live Global Strategy Event

8 interactive strategy launch sessions transmitted live from a London studio to eight locations around the world, including Spain, France, Canada, Sweden, the USA, and Australia.

Award-winning
Transforming Skills

An immersive 2-day experience for undergraduates to learn key skills and behaviours relevant to the working world.

GLOBAL TEAM SUMMIT
Multisensory Team Summit

A cutting-edge immersive and multisensory event that brought together a new global team for the first time.

RAPID UPSKILLING
Accelerating Graduate Skills

Bupa commissioned The Smarty Train to design a series of graduate skills sessions, grounding their Early Talent in business-critical soft skills.

We’d love to
hear from you!

The Smarty Train
24A Marshalsea Road
London
SE1 1HF

Contact us

getintouch@thesmartytrain.com +44 (0)20 7089 5630

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