Guiding Vision of the Virtual Learning Center

 

The Newkirk Group

Raymond L. Newkirk, Psy.D., Ph.D. founded The Newkirk Group with the complexities of today’s world in mind - a world marked by the challenges of global trends which stretch the limits of accepted paths to professional education. The Newkirk Group is attuned to the problems of today while driven by the challenges of tomorrow. We are both "now oriented" and "future driven." We deliver learning content designed to solve today’s problems with proven solutions and seek to bring the discoveries of virtual-learning research into the practical world of business enterprise.

Mission of the Founder

In 1986, recognizing the need to extend the disciplined inquiry of virtual-learning into the business community, Dr. Raymond L. Newkirk built a team of executives, consultings specialists, and learning experts to form the Newkirk Group. The mission was clear. Through softskills-focused virtual-learning programs, The Newkirk Group will:

  • Bridge the gap between academia and business to introduce virtual-learning as a practical approach to business problem solving.
  • Facilitate the extension of virtual-learning into business and government organizations to solve complex problems throughout the world.
  • Promote the use of virtual-learning concepts, principles, and technologies in the development of high performance workgroups, organizations, and enterprises.
  • Enable professionals to increase knowledge and expertise or build competence in the professional softskills.
  • Provide a global knowledge repository of virtual-learning content.
  • Become a leading authority on softskills development.

The Newkirk Group is a successful global professional services company that provides a range of coaching, mentoring, training, development and  to emerging and established companies.  Uique in our approach to virtual learning, we move from consulting practice to content development and then learning design to application. From the insights gained through real-world consulting engagements, wer developed learning programs to build the essential softskills of clients in order to refine management thinking and practice.

 

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Softskills-Focused

The terms hardskills and softskills are paradoxical. They should be reversed. Why is it that hardskills are less challenging to master than the softskills? Perhaps because they have more to do with things than people, the quantitative rather than the qualitative. Things are easy, but people are difficult. Since we focus on people, not things, we excel at enabling others to master the soft side of the workplace, the people side, through the mastery of professional softskills.

Departing from the approach of many training and education companies, The Newkirk Group virtual-learning architecture focuses on the enhancement of soft-skills.  We are soft-skills focused.  Our approach focuses on the design ande selection of learning methodology.  While our learning content enables the learning capabilities of clients by linking learning to virtual-access, our approach results in high levels of client satisfaction by offering immediate transfer of learning into the workplace.

Whether we ae consulting one-on-one with an executive at the pinnacle of decision-making or working with a team, we minimize the risk of new training by aligning the virtual-learning approach to the unique environment of the client.

Commitment to Professional Skills

Through our many years of consulting experience, we have found that a gap exists between campuses and the workplace. For too long now, colleges and private training organizations have neglected workplace skills. As a result, the essential skills and competencies that executives and managers desire in their employees have seriously eroded, if not completely disappeared. The Newkirk Group fills this gap.

These skills and competencies include: managing self, communicating, managing people and tasks, and mobilizing innovation and change. Unfortunately, these competencies have become echoes of the past as schools and colleges focus on disciplinary or specialized learning while mostly ignoring the core competencies required for success in the workplace. The Newkirk Group changes the trend.

Intellectual Capital Development Services

The Newkirk Group recognizes that the need to make the shift from the 20th to the 21st Century is becoming more immediate as the trend toward global and more complex work teams increases. We have developed softskills-based programs and curricula that promote the development of innovative thinkers, executives, and leaders as well-rounded professionals in the postmodern world marked by globalization.

Leadership Development and Virtual-Learning

In previous years, people accepted two factors as the criteria for professional success: (1) the abilities to plan, organize, control, and allocate the resources entrusted by senior management, and (2) the ability to gain recognition and acknowledgment from senior management for any success achieved. In such an environment, people often equated success with luck.

Today, dramatic insight has altered our understanding of what one must do to be a successful manager. Associated with this development in management thought is an expansion in the language used to describe management practice. What executives formerly considered as good management practice is now looked upon as merely excellent clerkship. Leadership and innovation are the future.

The Newkirk Group's response to this dynamic revolution in management wisdom leverages the power of virtual-learning to bring continuing education to anyone anywhere who has access to the convenience of the Internet. We provide direction and training to managers to enable them assimilate this important development in employee training and development. We uses the convenience of the Internet to offer a positive path to increasing team performance by building intellectual capital in every organization. In this way, The Newkirk Group enables executives to become effective leaders.

Life-Long Learning

An important component of our softskills development focus is our commitment to life-long learning. Again and again, we have found that accomplished individuals have a hunger for learning that never diminishes. Whether in problem solving, softskills enhancement, or pure knowledge acquisition, successful individuals continually seek to sharpen their intellects. For these individuals, competence is not an insult, it is the intimate attribute of their life. Through our Virtual-Learning Center, we offer life-long learning opportunities designed to enhance the softskills of clients. Our programs are more practical than theoretical and focus on doing.

Task Competencies

We believe task competencies: (a) are grounded in softskills; (b) exist along a continuum of levels; (c) start with relevant information; (d) exist in relation to specific tasks; (e) are improved by practice; (f) are measured by selective judgments of performance, and (g) satisfy a criterion of "good enough."

Competence consists of general and specialized knowledge. While the specialized knowledge includes discipline-specific skills, the general knowledge includes managing self, communicating, managing people and tasks, and mobilizing innovation and change, the softskills. These core competencies form the common language of competence and serve as the core softskills for mastering the external world.

Results

Choosing The Newkirk Group as your Virtual-Learning partner, you can expect to increase trust in the workplace, improve communications, and raise the levels of commitment and cooperation. You can expect our programs to improve executive and management performance within organization teams and develop involved employees to design creative solutions in mobilizing innovation and change.

"Successful Internet delivered learning immerses one in the learning experience and provides opportunities to practice in a safe environment."

Raymond L. Newkirk