My name: Martin Boult
My company: New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF)
My title: Team Leader Training Technology
My location: Devonport, Auckland, New Zealand
Best business advice I ever received: I believe business and industry could take a lead from the Hippocratic oath, taken by all medical doctors. The oath, primum non nocere, translated from the original Greek to Latin, is: First, do no harm. Another piece of advice I abide by is: Learn to walk in the shoes of your stakeholders. These guiding principles emanate from my degree and postgraduate studies specializing in sustainable design.
Most daring personal career move: Quitting a long and relatively successful academic career to move into L&D and learning technologies. I have enjoyed teaching in both the secondary (high school) and tertiary sector (polytechnic, university) for nearly 25 years. When an opportunity arose to move away from a teaching/lecturing role into a more strategic role within an exciting and dynamic work environment, I decided to jump. While I missed the student contact and the immediate rewards of seeing my students grow and achieve, the challenges and diversity of daily life as a civilian educator in a military environment more than make up for any initial regrets. This is the most exciting and rewarding workplace and career move I have ever made.
What I’m most proud of: I take pride in being a lifelong learner and putting my knowledge and skills to work in the public education and training sector. In total, I think I’m on my 15th year of tertiary study. Some has been full time, other part time, but I have used education to enable and sustain transitions in my career. From engineering to teaching, design to eLearning, and now, in a management role, I continue to supplement my workplace professional development with a personal investment in postgraduate studies. My current study is a distance postgraduate diploma in education (eLearning) at Massey University in New Zealand.
Current workplace challenge: Meeting the challenge of keeping learning technologies and andragogy in step within a large organization. Keeping pace with learning technologies while attempting to align policy, military doctrine, and organizational systems is not a unique problem. My directorship (NZ) with the Advanced Distributed Learning Partnership has been critical in finding commonality and shared problem-solving opportunities with partner organizations in the US, Canada, Australia, UK, and Scandinavia. My team members all invest in a number of professional development opportunities, and we often run in-house workshops to ensure the learning is shared and opportunities to innovate are not missed.
Something people don’t know about me: I ride a unicycle every day for my mental and physical well-being. It makes people smile as I pass them by.