Our new approach encourages colleagues to think about and take more of an active role in your own learning. We want colleagues to be curious and explore learning opportunities that will help you develop professionally and personally.
As part of our new approach, we will offer a range of different learning materials and formats that you can dip in and out of at various stages of your career at Barnardo’s depending on what you need.
This content will be divided into three intersecting layers:
Fundamentals - our expectations of all colleagues at Barnardo’s. This includes mandatory induction learning for all colleagues, and regularly renewed mandatory learning – such as the annual data protection refresher.
Focus includes learning opportunities tailored to your role or area of work to support your development. Focus learning is split into two categories: technical (for example first aid skills or lifting and handling) and behavioural (for example communication skills or team working). Learning opportunities in Focus will come in a variety of formats including facilitated sessions, e-learning modules, short videos, podcasts, and links to blog posts, external websites and social learning spaces.
Within our Curious layer, learning opportunities about a wide range of Barnardo’s skills are available for everyone to delve into. This is where you have space to explore learning new skills, which might not be directly relevant to your role, but can support your wider development within Barnardo’s. Learning opportunities in Curious will mostly come in the form of digital content, such as videos, podcasts or articles.
Learning will look different to us all depending on our area of the charity and our role, and what may be ‘Curious’ learning for some, will be highly relevant for others and fall into their ‘Focus’ layer of learning. Our skills mapping process will help us identify this for all Barnardo’s teams.
What is Skills Mapping?
This will be a collaborative process where we work with teams to understand what skills are needed, and what learning opportunities we can provide that support skills development in these areas.
It will take time to complete this as we work together to create learning opportunities that support development for everyone.
We’ll share our roadmap of skills mapping work on a quarterly basis, so you know which teams we’re working with next.
The Three Day Learning Commitment
Our three-day learning commitment is still in place. As always, this doesn’t need to be used across three full days and can be broken down and used as needed.
We know from feedback that colleagues often struggle to dedicate time to learning so our new approach makes this easier, for example, you may spend 5 minutes watching a video, 10 minutes reflecting on putting new skills into practice, 30 minutes engaging with some digital content, one hour reading an article, or one day shadowing a colleague in a different role. These all count towards your three days of learning!