Learning at Work Week: Learning Uncovered

‘Learning Uncovered’ is a great focus of this year’s Learning at Work Week. It opens up and expands our thoughts to consider how people want to learn and how people want to access learning. The LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2021, found that 63% of L&D professionals agreed that L&D has a seat at the executive table, meaning that L&D is being recognised as crucial to business growth and employee satisfaction.

The City & Guilds annual skills index 2021, found that 30% of UK workers said that they had not received formal workplace training in the last five years, and 11% stated that they had never received any training from their employers. Adding the fact that 94% of employees said that they would stay at a company longer if there is investment in their development, it is clear that the importance of learning at work and access to do this, demonstrates to employees that they are valued. Therefore, investing in developing people’s skills is an excellent way to show this.

Pick Everard have consistently invested in developing our people, through supporting via academic qualifications, such as apprenticeships, sponsorships, routes to chartership and other accredited courses, ensuring that our people have access to CPD sessions as well as hosting a variety of in-house training/ workshops on a mixture of soft skills. Towards the end of 2021, we further demonstrated our commitment by purchasing a new e-learning and LMS platform from Kallidus. We invested a lot of time into researching and ensuring that the platform we were buying was going to enable us to provide our people with the right level of high-quality content, alongside a system that is atheistically pleasing and straightforward to use.

Our platform, named PickademyPlus, launched at the end of March 2022. Since its launch, we have received consistent positive feedback from our people about its features, content, and access to new ways of learning. Our people can now enjoy a new and flexible form of communication with their line managers for their learning and development, ensuring that all parties are clear with where an individual is in their professional journey. The platform allows for any knowledge and skills gaps to be ‘uncovered’ and for us to support our people by providing them with the tools and resources they require for success.

We are excited about the changes that we have made to fit into hybrid working approach. This has meant that we have adapted our learning offerings and established how our employees wanted to access and receive learning, as we now have our people working from over 600 different locations each day. We did this by using technology to our advantage, from moving our Lunch + Learn sessions online, meaning more people than ever before could access the information being shared. Additionally, we launched a national mentoring programme, RISE, enabling individuals to connect with others in the firm to build upon their skills and develop new relationships.

Thinking about the needs of our people, the limits of time, individual preferences and learning styles, we wanted to ensure that individuals had access to resources where they could also learn about themselves. We have created an online 360 feedback tool, promoting individuals to seek and gain feedback from their peers, creating an open opportunity to build upon their personal and professional skills. To enhance this, we also provide the chance for people to undertake personality profiling.

Building a knowledgeable workforce ensures that as a firm, we will continue to see many successful years to come. Understanding that this is a return on our investment in our people has been key, to not only achieving our past targets, but also is instrumental in allowing us to continue to drive forwards to reach our future goals.