Cheltenham Borough Council were looking for a platform that would help them achieve a consistent approach to all areas of learning
Public Sector
The vibrant and elegant Regency town of Cheltenham is located on the edge of the Cotswold Hills. The borough council employs around 235 people in a variety of roles and provides services to local residents throughout the 20 wards in the borough of Cheltenham.
Typically, learning and development at Cheltenham Borough Council has been somewhat sporadic, with provision being inconsistent across the business and not well coordinated. There had, at one time, been an LMS housing some online learning but this was pulled due to the supplier ceasing trading. The L&D and modernisation teams identified a need for a platform that could manage all their training needs, alongside their people objectives. They needed it to deliver learning in key areas, including providing a corporate induction that was fit for purpose and available at the point that people joined the organisation. They wanted to offer a calendar of learning that would not only satisfy their compliance and regulatory requirements but also meet other development and well-being needs of staff. The extended vision was to create a leadership programme which would allow staff across all areas of the business to understand what it was to be a leader within the council.
Cheltenham Borough Council implemented Learning Pool’s Learning Management System along with the Foundation Skills and Government learning Catalogues.
The system houses all of the council’s online courses, a corporate induction and their leadership development programme. It has also been developed to incorporate their performance development plans within ‘My Conversations’, an area which allows them to record monthly check-ins conversations as well as more formal quarterly reviews.
For the leadership development programme, Cheltenham Borough Council partnered with Gloucester College to provide ILM accredited training. The full programme is available through the LMS. Three tiers of leadership are supported within the system, with varying levels of accredited workshops, self-paced learning and reflective practice available, depending on the tier of management applicable.
The LMS has taken our elearning to a different level, allowing us to not only easily rollout training modules but also provided us with a basis for accredited leadership development and our new approach for performance management; ‘my conversations’.
The system went live exactly at the point the UK went into lockdown as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the timing for the launch wasn’t ideal, having the LMS in place during this period allowed the council to respond to the organisation’s needs, including delivering a redeployment package for those staff that had been reassigned to other areas of the business.
The council has realised some significant savings by implementing the system. It has allowed them to tackle many different subject areas in a more cost-effective way and most significantly to implement and manage the blended leadership programme.
Matthew Dring, L&D Partner, commented: “We couldn’t speak highly enough of Learning Pool and the level of support that we have received from them. They conducted awareness sessions with our senior managers which were very useful and the whole process from the sale, right through to implementation, was faultless.”
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