A live, interactive workshop about helping people become ready for greater responsibility—when operational demands and scarce expert time keep getting in the way
Everyone agrees that developing people matters. Yet operational demands keep winning, experienced professionals have little time to coach, and development programs struggle to sustain momentum. Meanwhile, people are taking on greater responsibility before organizations have confidence they are ready.
This workshop offers a more grounded way to think about technical capability development, starting with the work people need to be ready to do. Brendan Howard and Marc Borbas will draw on practical examples to explore what helps development take hold when time and expertise are limited.
We’ll examine why traditional development approaches are under pressure, what training activity can tell us about readiness, and how people build judgment through meaningful exposure and feedback.
Make capability gaps visible, focus learning where it matters, and create opportunities to practice before the pressure is real.
Bring one upcoming responsibility someone in your organization will need to take on. You’ll use it to explore where development should begin.
Opening stories and a poll exploring growing development needs and shrinking time.
Establish a meaningful starting point, focus learning on priority gaps and build judgment through realistic situations and feedback.
Identify the responsibility, consider the evidence that would build confidence and clarify where development should begin.
Marc Borbas leads Edumine, helping mining organizations develop the technical capability their people need to perform. Running a technical training business has given him a close view of where development succeeds, where it stalls and why access to courses alone rarely solves the problem.
His work focuses on connecting learning to the responsibilities people carry and the decisions they need to make. Marc is exploring how assessment, focused learning and realistic practice can help organizations build readiness while making better use of limited development time and the expertise of experienced professionals.
Brendan Howard is a geologist and mining industry consultant who spent 33 years with Rio Tinto, including nine years leading its global technical capability program. Brendan brings firsthand experience of the challenge facing mining organizations: developing people while meeting operational demands and making effective use of scarce expertise.
His career spans exploration and operations across Australia, Indonesia, Peru, Canada and India. As General Manager Technical Capability, he led efforts to assess and strengthen technical capability in support of safety, productivity and technical risk management.
He is currently undertaking doctoral research into critical minerals and public policy at the Australian National University.
