CPD & Staff Development

Let's be frank; most staff training days and workshops about invasive plant species leave a lot to be desired. Many times content is outdated and reliant on largely anecdotal case studies, let alone any rigorous scientific data.

And delivery? Delivery can be a little lack-lustre.

Who wants to spend an afternoon wading through latin nomenclature, grainy photocopies of distribution maps and the same old cliches about Japanese knotweed, Butterfly bush and Himalayan balsam that abound for free all over Google?

All too often CPD and staff training is seen by providers as a easy revenue generator.

With almost three decades of academic and professional experience between us here at Advanced Invasives, we've sat through more than our fair share of droning presentations and dull lectures ourselves.

We don't do any of this.

First of all we listen.

Before we even start, we find out precisely what your organisation wants to get out of working with us. We know that staff time on training is a serious expense, both in time and the effort of getting everyone together in one place. So we draw out the areas and business risks arising from invasive plants that are important to your business operations.

We actively challenge clients where we think they are missing something vital. We sometimes even turn down clients who we think would benefit from a different service, recommending them to partners who can help them more precisely.

Next; content.

It's easy to spot presentations in the invasive species industry that have been cobbled together. The same old structure. The same old quotes.

All of our workshop content at Advanced Invasives has been fundamentally scrutinised, interrogated and re-worked from the ground-up.

On the research side we have a unique long-term empirical dataset - our private research facility ai:LAB is where Dr Dan Jones and Dr Gareth Bruce undertook the world's most comprehensive field trial on the herbicide control of Japanese knotweed. From 2011-2018 this one project alone set a new standard across the industry.

We'll (concisely!) explore the practical implications of our peer reviewed paper that summarises the results of the field trial and has over 6,300 downloads to date, and how all this relates to treatment. We'll draw on case studies from our strategy and public comms work with some of the UK's biggest landowners and asset managers, and also our active R&D projects with some of the world's largest herbicide manufacturers.

Many providers are 'experts' in a narrow specialism; our expertise is how everything relates together. Both Dr Dan Jones and Dr Gareth Bruce are highly regarded expert witnesses and work closely with some of the preeminent barristers who specialise in invasive plant species liability. Advanced Invasives benefits from a rolling programme of case study development collating on the ground research from surveyors, valuers, mortgage advisors and local authorities. This means our recommendations to clients are anchored in both scientific data and evolving case studies, but also related to the increasingly complex interplay of legislative instruments and skeleton arguments of the civil cases concerning invasives liability.

So we offer a bolt-on support service for executives and senior managers to assist them with more intractable invasive species problems, ranging from complaint management, tone of voice guidance and even business cases for their own habitat restoration projects and net gain initiatives. Some of these are short-term, monthly retainers. Others develop into year-by-year advisory partnerships.

Lastly; design.

Information alone is not enough. How well it coheres together is what empowers people to really make the most of it.

If you have a particular need for information delivery, whether in simple schematics, photos or flow charts, or even apps and chatbots, we can make it happen.