Nicole van de Ven – Smeelen (HBtraining) about her own learning journey

That she was going to be an entrepreneur was a given. After all, as the child of two hospitality entrepreneurs, Nicole van de Ven – Smeelen of HBtraining grew up with the hard and independent way of working. In her work she strives for perfection: “Everything has to be right in a training course”. And with results, as this year HBtraining won our award for Most Inspiring Learning Journey with the onboarding program for sales promoters.

What is your background?

“I come from a real entrepreneurial family. My parents had a thriving hospitality business in Asten, a café/discotheque with a party room which thousands of people visited every week to party. My parents were much more than just bar owners, they were real entrepreneurs.

My mother was a great hostess and always listened to everybody. My father constantly kept an eye on new ways to attract audiences. He booked all kinds of artists, from Adam Curry and the Zangeres Zonder Naam to the British pop duo Mel & Kim, who were hardly known at the time. I learned a lot from how my parents handled business. As a child I was always listening to what they were talking about. They taught me to work independently and hard. I can now recognise the innovation that my father had in myself.

When I was fifteen my mother died in a fatal accident and ten years later the same happened to my brother. That does form you as a person. I learned that I had to be strong and that I had to do things myself. You have to take your own responsibilities and pursue your own dreams.”

Was self-employment a logical step?

“It was for me. After secondary school I did several studies. I started at the heao (Higher Economic and Administrative Education), after which I spent three years at the pabo (teacher training) and I also did some journalism. Then I went to the hotel management school, an awesome study that I did finish.

I worked less than a year as a sales promoter at my first employer, Nespresso, when I thought: this is not going to work, I want to start something for myself. That was a very strong belief. Together with my husband Paul, I founded my first company, Vesmee Trainingen.”

How did you end up in the training world?

“In my time at Nespresso, I used to give a coffee training once in a while. I noticed that I really enjoyed transferring knowledge in an enthusiastic and interactive way. Then I saw that the salespeople really started to love the brand and that the sales results went up. More and more often I was called upon as a self-employed person to give training courses.

This is how I developed myself. One day, the two owners of field marketing agency Hamilton Bright followed a training with me. Afterwards, they came to me to say that this was the first training course they were excited about. They wanted to train their own employees and so I started HBtraining in 2010, as Hamilton Bright’s first joint venture.”

What does HBtraining do?

“We train customers’ employees in all different kinds of positions. These can be sales promoters, but also, for example, area managers for Unilever or managers of call centres for KPN. At Red Bull, we are currently working on a great project. We are training auditors for them who are based in 57 different countries and speak 22 different languages. We have just rolled out the American version and are now working on the Canadian and English versions. The rest will follow later this year. I don’t believe there’s a learning journey of aNewSpring in so many countries.”

Why is learning/training so important?

“Because I believe that every person can show a better version of themselves every day. You can develop yourself very well when you really want something. At that moment, the offer must be there or at least you must be able to find it. I am a great advocate of top down learning, where people first show what they already know and are capable of. If you make that clear, they can develop from that point on. That works very well.”

What is important to you in your profession?

“I want everything to be right in a training. Everything has to be thought of: the room has to look neat, the chairs have to be straight, the coffee has to be ready and the computers have to have been tested. It’s not just about the content of a training course and the skill of the trainer, but also about everything around it. That perfection is very important to me. That also applies to an online training, for example the use of good lighting or the use of a perfect camera, not just a simple webcam. That really makes a difference.”

How important are the online training courses?

“If you look at how our brain works, you’ll see that it’s important to repeat a lot. By offering learning materials online as well, everybody can learn when it is convenient for him or her. And with this, I also mean that you learn best when you really need the knowledge. I think the perfect blend is a combination of online and offline learning. Because of this corona situation, digital learning is on the rise.

I’ve been struggling for years to convince our clients to include online training in face-to-face training, but they didn’t want to. Now that people work from home a lot, digital learning is becoming more self-evident. Customers see that a lot is possible in that area. We now create learning journeys in which we combine e-learning with virtual classroom training and physical training. I am convinced that we will continue to do this, even when everything returns back to ‘normal’.”

With Hamilton Bright Brand Activation’s onboarding program for sales promoters you won our 2020 award. What makes this program so successful?

“One of the strengths is that we really focused on a specific target group, Generation Z: young people with a short tension curve who are visually oriented. We made the content easily accessible for mobile devices, we used appealing language and we applied a lot of variety in learning methods, for example videos, vlogging, quiz elements and assignments.

I think the possibility you have on the platform of aNewSpring to submit an assignment in the form of a kind of vlog is a golden move. This allows a young person to have personal contact with his manager without having to sit together. The manager can react to the video when it suits him. Everyone learns when he wants to learn and is coached when he wants to be coached. You can build a learning journey like this very successfully in aNewSpring.”