Christine Chittenden Interview - Adjusting A Training Business Through Covid

In this episode, we get to learn about Christine Chittenden, her business, and how they are adjusting to Covid. Christine is the CEO and owner of Transformational Institute in New South Wales. They deliver accredited and non-accredited courses in health, community services and business leadership and management. 

Christine shared how their company adapted to the pandemic, the challenges the business and their clients faced, the strategies they implemented to help their staff and students, and how she keeps motivated to face these challenges.

Christine also shared the importance of motivation and mental health for her, her students, and staff. 

Episode Highlights: 

• Who is Christine and what does she do?
• "I really want to make a difference in people's lives and give our learners the best experience and training possible so that they leave the RTO knowing that they had the skills and knowledge to be a great manager or a great carer, and to have the tools to progress in their career."
• Christine's biggest challenge in the past six months
• Because of the lockdown, progress slowed, motivation is down. There are also a lot of distractions at home and different other reasons why students couldn't attend webinars or submit their work.
• The transition from face-to-face to online
• "It's really hard to motivate people when they don't feel the urgency."
• Christine and her team upgraded their online learning platform, and even ensured hard copies of lessons are available for their students, but there are still challenges with ensuring students comply with the lessons and such.
• What was it like when students returned to the classrooms?
• "I wrote a really detailed Coronavirus plan. I added things to the student workbook, to the trainer handbook. We added it. Put a few Facebook things out about what we were doing."
• Not all students though are all back in the classrooms. Christine believes it will stay like that for some time.
• "I've done everything I can think of to make it safe for everybody. And so far it's been working really well."
• If we were to go into a second lockdown, a second wave, how prepared does Christine feel compared to the first time? And what would Christine do differently this time?
• How did Christine come up with setting up a studio? And why did she do that?