Michael Atherton

As the principal consultant, Michael leads most of the workshops run by Connections Training. He has been a training and development specialist for over 15 years, and has extensive line management experience:

Halifax Financial services:

• Recruited and trained an area sales team;
  
• Ongoing coaching, development and line management of the sales team;
  
• The sales team achieved their targets for each of the 5 years I was manager.

Clerical Medical Investment Group:

• Managed and trained a new Telesales team;
• Trained the team from ‘scratch’ to qualified status;
• The team achieved its targets over the 3 years I was line manager.

His training approach is based on 3 key principles:

• Practical – the training must have an immediate business application;
• Interactive – engaging the learner in the process enables learning to commence immediately.  A mixture of exercises, self awareness and skills practise are used to achieve this;
  Fun – people learn best when the learning environment is a relaxed and enjoyable one.