For any organisation, having the right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time is vital if it is to achieve its long-term strategic ambitions. Yet this can be challenging, especially in today’s business environment where new technologies, new workforce models and ways of working are changing skills requirements at a rapid rate.
It’s no surprise therefore that 63% of CEOs believe that a lack of the right talent will negatively impact their organisation’s growth over the next three years – or that 69% see investing in skills development and lifelong learning as the way to safeguard access to that future talent.
All of this is forcing employers to reassess and refresh their skills base on an increasingly frequent basis, paying careful attention to how they train or reskill their existing employees and how they improve skills mobility within their organisation.
That’s why we formed our Learning Services business; to help organisations build the people capability and skills they need for today and tomorrow.
That could involve:
- developing a learning strategy for tackling a particular skills shortfall;
- assisting with workforce transformation;
- building or modernising learning content;
- delivering an academy or an entire managed learning service;
- advising on how to establish a learning culture that helps meet organisational needs; or
- helping take full advantage of the available learning technology.
Ultimately, it’s all about learning in some shape or form. That’s what we do.
Our learning services
About us
From learning design and delivery through to learning technology and diagnostic advice, we offer a comprehensive range of services, designed to help organisations with all their learning requirements.
Using our learning partnerships, knowledge and expertise, we inject pace into an organisation’s upskilling and reskilling plans, helping them get to where they need to be as quickly and efficiently as possible.
In doing this, we deliver high quality, de-risked, cost-effective learning that represents excellent value for money. And we make sure that this learning is relevant; tied to business goals and workforce plans, so that an organisation gets the skills and the training it needs to improve both performance and productivity.
Bringing this all together – combining the breadth and quality of our services with our industry knowledge, client insight and business performance – is why we’ve now been recognised as one of the world’s top 20 learning services companies in each of the last three years.
Consistently recognised for excellence — awarded in 2022, 2023, and 2024
A shifting dynamic
Workplace learning has changed rapidly in recent years. The way in which the pandemic changed the relationship dynamic between employer and employee; economic conditions obliging organisations to cut costs; and the emergence of more disruptive technologies – all these factors have combined to create substantial challenges for anyone responsible for addressing organisational skills gaps.
On the one hand, these factors have led more and more senior leaders to question what their ideal learning function should look like and how it should operate. On the other, they’ve also forced organisations to undertake major change projects of their own; projects which often come with substantial skills requirements attached.
Ever since the formation of our Learning Services business in 2012, much of our work has been connected with these types of change projects. Regardless of whether they’re about refocusing an organisation’s main business priorities, optimising its cost base or improving its resilience, such projects typically have a workforce transformation component to them – because they leave an organisation requiring something new from its workforce.
But we’ve also worked extensively with clients looking to transform and modernise their own central learning function, rethinking how it supports the wider business and creates value by being strategically aligned and delivering operational excellence.
Our capabilities
With our extensive in-house team of learning and operational specialists, a substantial consortium of expert learning providers and a Microsoft-partnered technology offering, we can provide organisations with all the learning advice and support they require.
Our impressive in-house team features over 350 dedicated, experienced and highly credible Learning Services staff. The line-up includes everything from learning content designers and project managers through to learning technologists, quality assurance and evaluation specialists and a full customer service support team.
They work incredibly closely with the hugely talented and innovative learning businesses that make up our learning consortium. These range from small, specialist organisations through to some of the world’s most reputable business schools, academic institutions, universities and accrediting bodies.
Underpinning all of this are a host of other learning support functions, such as marketing and communications, IT, procurement and data and analytics. These add extra value by boosting learner engagement, providing powerful management information insights, helping clients to capitalise on their existing technology investments and saving staff time and money.
As one of the largest learning services companies globally, we use our scale and the relationships with our learning providers to secure the best possible prices for our clients. We further drive down costs by helping them take a firmer hold of their learning activities; consolidating, decluttering and transforming their curricula.
Combining all of this means we have the breadth and diversity to meet all learning and evaluation needs, cost effectively and at scale; something that we currently do for more than 600 learning clients, accounting for over 937,000 individual learners in the UK.
An impressive team
Most of our staff work across three teams:
What this capability allows us to do is to design and deliver entire curriculums; to create learning pathways; and to make available a vast wealth of learning activities, both off the shelf and bespoke.
As well as always being on the lookout for new and innovative tools and providers, we continue to add new specialisms to the in-house team, incorporating the latest services that we offer to clients from elsewhere in our global network of member firms.
Industry skills benchmarking, data analysis and customer experience mapping are just some of the disciplines to have been added to our learning offer in recent times, helping clients make even better decisions about their curriculum and how it’s managed.
Making a difference
What unites all our staff and suppliers is our belief that learning must make a difference – and that we can make learning better.
At an individual level, workplace learning should help you be even more productive in your current job – or help you secure a better job. At an organisational level, learning needs to deliver real, tangible results; something that justifies the investment.
That’s why learning needs to be meaningful and relevant; tailored to an individual’s job and to an organisation’s particular circumstances. By doing this, we’ve proved time and time again how we can help organisations to improve their performance and productivity. The best thing is, we’re still learning too, so – together – we’re only going to keep getting better at this.
Our consulting insights
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Our people
