Conversations, community and who gets to contribute

Rachel Burnham writes: Last week I visited Manchester City Art Gallery with a friend.  We went to see two exhibitions: a collection of Martin Parr’s fascinating pictures of Manchester life from the 1970s onwards; and ‘Speech Acts: Reflection – Imagination – Repetition’ which was asking questions about what museums collect and show, whose work is shown and the narratives around them.  Martin Parr’s photographs are always worth seeing and it was great to see something of the diversity of Manchester and the changes that have taken place of this period. 

The other exhibition was less accessible and I found it harder to get my head around.  It included a gallery looking at representation and expectations, with predominantly works created by BAME artists, a gallery exploring repetition and one looking at the part played by networks and the creation of spaces in shaping artistic practices.  This focused on a gallery that had been run in Cumbria, between 1972-83 by the artist Li Yuan-chia, which was described both as a centre for the local artistic community and focus for a wider cosmopolitan network.   Whilst many of the individual works were interesting, I struggled with the overall exhibition – yet all week, the parallels between the messages I picked up from this exhibition and the work I do as a volunteer and community member in L&D and HR have been tugging at me. All week it has been teasing me and making me look again at what I do and why.

Here are some of my thoughts prompted by that reflection – they are a bit untidy and half-baked, but they set out some of the thinking that drives my volunteering.

Alongside my business, I am involved as a volunteer and community member for a number of bodies within HR and L&D.  I am part of CIPD Manchester’s Branch Committee where I have lead responsibility for both our Public Policy and our L&D work.  I contribute to L&D Connect, being one of a team of people involved in facilitating Twitter Chats and Unconferences and I co-host #LnDCoWork Manchester, alongside Julie Drybrough and Mike Shaw.   All of these things are collaborative and it is wonderful to be a part of such great teams.

Over the last couple of years, I have really moved away from wanting to put my energy into organising events that are the traditional speaker-lead events.  I have been hugely influenced by the experience of being part of the L&D Connect community.   Gradually, in my other volunteering, I have been trying out different approaches and seeing what works and what seems to most valuable to the people participating.   In part this is applying what I know about how people learn and in part this is trying to make sense of what each organisation can helpfully and distinctively contribute to our professional field – eg what part can a CIPD branch play in a major city like Manchester.   And it is also about me trying to use my time wisely and spend it doing things that I enjoy, that feel worthwhile to me.

So, as part of these teams I have hosted focus groups, tried out hackathons, commissioned Ignite talks and ‘warts & all case studies’, borrowed ideas and developed CakeCamps and BreakfastCamps as result (thank you Martin Couzins), collaborated with #HRHour (thanks to Mark Hendy) and tried out a campaign approach with ‘The Big Conversation around Parents, Families and the Workplace’, including a series blog articles by a range of contributors.  All based in the Manchester area.   All with an emphasis on interaction, where participants are active contributors.

What all of this activity has in common is creating opportunities for conversation and creating communities of practitioners.   This is what creates opportunities for real learning and change – I think.

  

I think smaller, local and regional events have the opportunity to be much more radical and experimental in design than many of the national events.   With a smaller event it is possible to try out an approach, to play a bit and see what works.   And if it doesn’t go according to plan – that is OK – what can we learn from that? The costs are less, there is less public exposure, less commercial pressure, less risk if we don’t quite pull it off.

I want to celebrate good stuff right around the UK and not have everything to be originated in London or driven by London or done in response to London.   There are local needs and local agendas all around the country – certainly there are in Manchester, in the North West and across the North.  We need to be addressing these issues and then sharing our lessons and expertise nationally.   

  

I think that face to face events can complement and run alongside on-line opportunities.  I love the way that my PLN (Personal Learning Network) has largely been developed online, but flourishes in face to face meetings too!  It doesn’t have to be an either/or.   It is great to have the international dimension and sheer diversity of an online community, plus there is the convenience factor of being able to connect with people wherever and in odd moments of the day.  But face to face has a neighbourliness to it and a depth, plus opportunities for shared meals and cake eating.

I have been working on designing events and activities that give a greater range of people the opportunity to have their say and share their experience.  I don’t subscribe to the view that we should all have the opportunity to be speakers  – but I do think that we all have stuff to contribute and relevant experience to share.  I want to create opportunities for us to be challenged by putting our own experience into a wider context and through discussion, debate, reflection, problem-solving together develop ideas to take back to our own workplaces.  You rarely get the opportunity to properly do this within a traditional style speaker led event. 

I am particularly interested in what happens when people really start listening to one another and the cascade you get when people start to open up and people respond by listening more deeply. What enables this, what sustains this and what can happen if it is set loose?

I find it interesting to see how word spreads between the different networks, communities and events that I am involved in.   I think that one of our challenges in L&D and in HR, is that people often don’t know about all the good stuff out there, the resources, networks and learning opportunities that are available to them.   So, that if someone comes into contact with the Twitter chat #LDInsight, or turns up at #LnDCoWork or finds themselves at a CIPD Manchester CakeCamp they are then amazed to discover all the different things that this then gives them access to – it is a ‘first contact’ situation that acts like a vortex into a series of other universes.  Or perhaps I watch too much sci-fi!

I am keen for CIPD Manchester to continue to develop all kinds of collaborative relationships and links with other networks and organisations operating locally.  It was great to work this year with Acas on behalf of CIPD Manchester on a joint Flexible Working Conference and it was great to support the eLearning Network with the unconference element of its Manchester event last summer.   It is easy for organisations and groups to work in isolation and be unaware or unwilling to work with other organisations operating in the same field.   We need open gates, lots of signposting and travellers to act as go-betweens.  

I wonder if by having a number of different kinds of networks in and around the Manchester area we can have a bigger impact.  I think it may depend on how open & welcoming the networks are and whether we can continue to reach out and invite in other people within our field who are less connected.   

I feel as though I have only just begun a very interesting journey and there are many possibilities ahead.  But I feel certain that conversations and building community are core to what lies ahead. 

Rachel Burnham

13 January 2019

Burnham L & D works with individuals and organisations to help them learn and work more effectively.  As part of this I help L&D professionals to be even more effective through updating their skills and know-how.  I have a particular interest in curation and the use of digital technologies in learning.  I frequently Sketchnote at events and offer workshops in Sketchnoting.  

Sketchnotes from CIPD NAP Student Conference 2018

Rachel Burnham writes: It was lovely to have the chance to represent CIPD Manchester at the annual Northern Area Partnership (NAP) conference for CIPD students.  I got to meet lots of interesting students from across the whole of the North of England, from Liverpool to Humberside and from Sheffield to the NE. Why not check out the #CIPD18Student for tweets from the event? 

  

The speakers were excellent and the sessions covered a lot of ground from the ‘Future of Work and the People Profession’,  through to ‘personal resilience’ and ‘developing your networking skills and personal brand through the use of social media’.   Particular highlights for me were hearing the personal stories of Jennifer Hulme about heading up HR in a retail environment and Nicky Ingham sharing her story of developing personal resilience.   I thought the emphasis on the practical case studies in the event was very helpful.  It was good to hear from Mike Collins at River Island on how they have re- shaped Performance Management – which is a very topical issue and one that a lot of organisations are working on currently. 

But the stand-out session for me, was from Lisa Rigby and Helen Baggaley at Wigan Council, with how they approached transforming the culture at the council in the wake of the cuts from austerity measures.  I loved hearing how they decided not to use a ‘traditional training’ approach, but created an experience to engage employees instead.  This was a very unique ‘walk-through’ experience and involved colleagues acting as tour guides through a physical site showing the council ‘past, present and future’.  It included a film room showing videos with popcorn and everyone was encouraged to make pledges about what they would do differently as a result.  This wasn’t a stand-alone programme, but linked to many other supportive steps as well.   It was great to hear about the measurable impact this had.

This approach is very much what Nick Shackleton-Jones argues for - creating an ‘experience’ with an emotional impact and it was great to see this approach being developed as a practical response to addressing the particular concerns and needs within this council.

Here is my collection of Sketchnotes from the event: 

If you are a student studying CIPD courses and didn’t attend this year’s event, do look out for next year’s. 

Rachel Burnham

26/3/18

Burnham L & D works with individuals and organisations to help them learn and work more effectively.  As part of this I help L&D professionals to be even more effective through updating their skills and know-how.  I have a particular interest in curation and the use of digital technologies in learning.  I frequently Sketchnote at events and offer workshops in Sketchnoting.  

My Learning from 'The Big Conversation'

Rachel Burnham writes: Way back in the Spring of 2017, I started to have a wild idea about hosting a public policy hackathon via social media.   I have to confess that at the time I wasn’t entirely sure what a ‘hackathon’ was or how you would run one, but I was pretty sure that somewhere in my PLN (personal learning network) there would be someone who did know! 

Aside from my work as an L&D Consultant, I volunteer with CIPD Manchester as a member of the branch committee and specifically as Public Policy Lead.  

I had been noticing for some time reference to increasing incidents of maternity discrimination in the workplace and this had been niggling at me, as an issue that needed exploration.   And I saw this as a topic where lots of HR people would have experience and might be interested in contributing their ideas about why this was happening and what could be done about it.  I speculated that there might be things to be addressed both at a public policy level and at an individual organisational level, so this could be a suitable topic for CIPD Manchester’s public policy work.  As I pondered on the topic, I began to wonder if this might be tackled through some kind of collaborative problem-solving approach ie hackathon.   And out of this the idea for ‘The Big Conversation about Families, Parents and the Workplace’ grew.

I should explain that CIPD Manchester has a five year successful history of public policy work, established by my predecessor as CIPD Manchester Public Policy Lead, Jacqui Woodhouse.   This work involves a panel of HR professionals who meet regularly to discuss and contribute to public policy issues that impact on HR and L&D work in organisations – by public policy we mean any actions of government or governmental bodies (national, local or international) that impact on HR, so changes in employment legislation, skills policy and funding arrangements are all things that we have looked at.  We contribute to consultations from government on such initiatives and have often acted as a focus group to inform policy making by CIPD nationally, Acas and to inform research undertaken by local universities.  Our meetings are sometimes speaker led, but often aren’t and instead are based around us sharing our practical and varying experience of the specific topic being explored.  I often joke that I am usually the person in the room who knows least about the topic in discussion – I see my role as bringing the right people together to talk and listen to each other – this is usually a mix of HR/L&D people and relevant subject matter experts/researchers.

And back in the spring, I was ready to try something different – I wanted us to reach out and involve a wider group of HR professionals, perhaps not just in the Greater Manchester area.  Over the previous year, I was aware that we had attracted participants to our meetings from West Yorkshire, Lancashire,  Merseyside and South Yorkshire, so I knew that there was some interest from wider afield.  I also felt that the time was right for us to initiate something from CIPD Manchester, rather than just respond to requests from CIPD or the other bodies that we are linked to.   We had done this a bit in the past, initiating meetings on the Northern Powerhouse and on the Apprenticeship Levy, but this was a step change.

This is a fairly long blog post, as I want to capture something of the process of how this came about, what was involved and most importantly, what I have learnt from doing it. 

Getting Started

So, I started talking to people about this idea – the branch committee, other public policy advisers based in other branches, HR people I met at other events, people in my PLN and so on.  Gradually the focus of this event widened out to not just focus on maternity discrimination, but childcare, shared parental leave, people with caring responsibilities other than children, flexible working and so on.   

Eventually, in mid-July I really started to focus on this initiative, scheduling some meetings with people who might be able to help.  A key meeting was with Gem Dale, @HR_Gem from The Work Consultancy to help me get my head around what a hackathon using social media might look like – we came up with the idea of a smorgasbord of ways of getting involved – a dedicated blog site, Twitter campaign using the hashtag #CIPDbigconvo, collaboration with any existing Twitter Chats, 24 hour online sprint conversations, with a face to face launch event.  As we were thinking about running this hackathon over an extended period, we decided on an initial campaign to build awareness using a unique visual identity and a series of commissioned blog posts – this would take place in September.  The face to face launch event would be held at the end of September, with the hackathon element taking place over 4 weeks in October.   We then had the good idea of using the CIPD ACE conference, which was taking place in Manchester in early November as a full stop to the initiative and had the idea to apply to run a fringe event at this event to report on ‘The Big Conversation’.

 

What happened?

We had about 6 weeks from those first detailed discussions in mid-July to early September when we planned to start the Twitter campaign.  I began by writing up a short proposal document to share with all the people who I wanted to get involved.  There was a lot to do, a lot of people to talk to and of course it was the key time for holidays.   I am so used to working in a very light touch way, as a freelancer and as a contributor to networks like L&D Connect, that it is hard to remember that some organisations work at a much slower pace.  Plus, there was paid work to fit into that time as well. 

Some elements went really well – our suggestion to Mark Hendy @markSWHRF for us to collaborate with the regular Twitter Chat (Thursdays 8-9pm) #HRHour met with an enthusiastic positive response and brought about the involvement of the S E Wales branch with ‘The Big Conversation’.  I was able to quickly delegate the formation of questions for that to Mike Shaw @MikeShawLD, a fellow Manchester CIPD member.  Gem Dale took on responsibility for setting up our dedicated blog cipdmcrbigconvo@wordpress.com and I set about commissioning blog articles from contacts in HR and relevant campaigning organisations.    I also took on responsibility for creating a visual image for the initiative, with support from Simon Heath @SimonHeath1, which meant getting my head around some basics in Photoshop.  I also contacted a number of CIPD branches that border Manchester to see if they would like to be involved.   This had a positive response and I offered a webinar briefing to support this involvement –  but on reflection the timing for doing this was poor, as it was right in the middle of the holiday season.  

We got the Twitter campaign launched, but a little later than intended and work started in earnest on planning the launch event for the end of September.   By then I was also handling the scheduling of Tweets and information on LinkedIn to promote the blog and was handling lots of enquiries, comments and offers of blog articles – I put some time into the intiative each day excepting Saturdays.  Ideally, this work would have been split between a number of people.  In the end we published 17 blog articles relating to different aspects of ‘The Big Conversation’ from 13 different authors – Gem and I each contributed a number of blogs.

The launch event took place on Wednesday 27^th September and was hosted by Kenworthy’s Chambers.   The event included three short presentations to inform and stimulate conversation: Roz Hampson, from Maternity Action on ‘Pregnancy Discrimination’; Susan Raftery, from Acas on ‘Carers’; and Gem Dale on ‘Flexible working’.  We had about 28 people at the event from across the country – York to London, with good a mix of people from campaign organisations, researchers from universities and HR folk.  I would have liked more people from HR. During the discussions we worked in groups to identify four key themes to explore in the rest of the initiative:

·       Creating the cultures we need

·       Flexible ‘flexible working’ policies for all

·       Changing attitudes and challenging stigma

·       Supporting line managers to manage effectively

The very next night we took over #HRHour and had a very helpful and lively conversation with lots of participation from HR people.  The tweets were gathered together and put into a storify. 

Originally, we planned to have the Hackathon part of ‘The Big Conversation’ take place on Twitter, but we didn’t feel that we had got enough HR folk involved in the initial stages of the initiative, so we thought that we would try LinkedIn instead.  Our reasoning is that even if a person doesn’t do any other social media they will be on LinkedIn, so that this would be our best chance of involving more HR folk.  I posted the first of the themes and some initial questions into CIPD Manchester group and, but despite encouragement we only had a few contributions and a lot of tumbleweed.   So then, we tried posting the next week’s theme and questions openly on LinkedIn – this was a bit more successful, but by the fourth week even this had gone quiet.    So, the hackathon joint problem-solving element of ‘The Big Conversation’ really didn’t work and we are not sure why.   Perhaps LinkedIn wasn’t the right platform?  We didn’t seem able to generate sufficient momentum with comments and shares to get more people involved.  I noticed that even fellow CIPD Manchester branch committee members mostly didn’t add comments, though they did add likes – I wonder if people felt comfortable having this kind of a conversation in ‘public’ in written form? 

The final fringe event was fast coming up and I realised that we wouldn’t be reporting back, as we had originally planned.  So instead, I planned a 1 hour hackathon style event.  Again, this started with two Ignite presentations (5 mins each, 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide) from Gem Dale and Gary Cookson @Gary_Cookson, one of CIPD Manchester’s Ambassadors to inspire us and getting us thinking about parenthood and flexible working.  Then we moved into four groups, one for each of the themes identified in the launch event and worked through a series of questions over the course of 30 mins, each group working at their own pace.  Each group was facilitated and each group asked to make notes on post-it notes of key points.   The questions were:

•      What is our ideal situation?
•      What gets in the way of our progress now? 
•      What works well today?
•       What can we do to drive real change?

At the end of this time each group gave a 1 minute report back.   The points written up on the post-it notes were subsequently written up as blog posts and put on ‘The Big Conversation’ blog.  

We had over 30 participants in this event and everyone took part.  The discussions were very focused, with lots of contributions and helpful points raised.    And this was all possible in a session last only 60 minutes and starting at 8am in the morning!   I think it helped that we served breakfast!

Lessons Learnt

Here are some of my reflections on ‘The Big Conversation’:

11.  If I was to do it again, I would start planning earlier.   I think there is a balance to be struck between being fast & agile and involving more people.  Ideally, I would have liked to have had more involvement from more people from CIPD Manchester and other branches and to enable this to happen more time would be needed to allow for people to get involved in an earlier stage and to take things back to committees.   Having said that, a risk with doing this could be that such an initiative doesn’t take place – I know that I have limited time to spend of my voluntary activities and I have a low liking for spending that time in meetings – I have experience through networks such as L&D Connect and #LnDCoWork for making things happen in a light touch way and I know that this can be very effective.  But this may not work to involve more people.

 2.  If I was to do this again, it would be good to involve more people in shaping the initiative.   This links very closely to the time issue and particularly to attempting to set up the initiative over the summer holiday months.   The upside of being slightly less participatory is possibly a greater willingness to try something different out.  The downside is that the initiative would have benefited from having a few more people to share the workload.

 3. One of the challenges of this initiative was finding the people with the right skills (who also had time, were willing to be involved and ideally were NW based).   For example, when it came to splitting responsibilities, there was only one other person in the CIPD Manchester network, who I knew of that had the experience of setting questions and facilitating twitter chats, other than myself.  Fortunately, they said ‘yes’ when asked to take this on.   There were a few more people who had experience of setting up blogs, writing blogs and scheduling tweets, but still there were a very limited number to draw on in this project.   I wonder if we want CIPD branches to work in different ways and take on innovative projects, whether we have the skills capacity in the branch network to do this or whether this is something which needs developing?  It is interesting that many of the skills I drew on for this project were developed outside of the CIPD ‘world’.

  4. It worked well in this initiative to collaborate with other organisations eg Acas, Maternity Action, individual bloggers and existing Twitter Chats eg #HRHour.   We do a lot of collaborative work in CIPD Manchester, which meant I was able to draw on some existing relationships and I think this is a very helpful way of working. 

  5. This initiative was definitely not an event.  It was good to try out something different as a branch.  It is a bit hard to know quite what to call this  – perhaps it was most like a ‘campaign’.   It was really helpful to have created a distinctive visual identity that united all the disparate elements of ‘The Big Conversation’.   

   6. Where we did have events – the launch and the breakfast fringe event at ACE, they weren’t traditional speaker led events.  Whilst we did have speakers at each event, in each case most of the event was highly participatory and got everyone involved and contributing.

  

   7. It is OK to try something out and it not work.   To my mind, we only partially succeeded at what we intended with ‘The Big Conversation’ – we raised some attention for these issues, we got some HR people involved, we built some partnerships, but we weren’t able to identify many practical examples of what is currently working nor did we really identify the key public policy issues.  We did try out some different approaches to CIPD membership engagement.   Some elements of how we addressed this worked very well.  Some fell flat.   Some elements metamorphed into something a bit different.   This is OK.  Glorious failures, which you learn lots from are a good thing in my book.

So, what next?

I thought that ‘The Big Conversation’ would just be a short term project, but I think that there will be some spin offs.  I know that there are likely to be some further actions as a result of some of the partnerships built – watch this space!

CIPD  announced at the Fringe Event we ran, that they would be running a campaign next year, focusing on ‘Flexible working for all’ which was a key issue that came out both of the launch event and also the #HRHour twitter chat.  So, look out for that and get involved.

And I have a few new wild ideas that I want to try out for CIPD Manchester next year – hold onto your hats!

Thank you

‘The Big Conversation about Families, Parents and the Workplace’ involved lots of people in making it work – thank you to all the people who got involved as bloggers, speakers, stewards, collaborators, tweeters, facilitators, advisers & suggesters.  I particularly want to thank Gem Dale for all her work throughout and without whom this would not have been possible. 

Rachel Burnham

26 November 2017

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals update and refresh their skills.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the use of digital skills for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance. 

Apprenticeships and the Levy – Opportunity & Challenge

Rachel Burnham writes: As you are probably aware, from April 2017, the government will be introducing the apprenticeship levy on all employers with a pay bill of more than £3 million per year.  The levy, set at 0.5% of the pay bill, will be paid through PAYE.  Employers, including those too small to pay the levy, will then be able to access funding to pay for apprenticeships through the new digital apprenticeship service.

Back in June 2016, CIPD reported on employer views of the proposals for the apprenticeship levy – my take on the research is broadly that the more employers knew about the proposals for the levy, the less they liked them!   However, the government is pressing ahead, so employers need to work out how to get the most benefit out of this new system for their organisation and for apprentices.

It was in that spirit that CIPD Manchester’s Public Policy Panel last week hosted three employers all with existing apprenticeship schemes to come and share this experience, plus their thoughts on the levy, with other HR professionals.   Our speakers were from Eurocell, AO and the General Medical Council and included two schemes with 25-30 apprentices and one scheme with 5 apprentices from the private and charitable sectors.   The range of apprenticeships offered was very varied from including engineering, HR, IT and digital marketing.  Here is a link to the Storify from that evening.

Effective apprenticeship programmes

Our speakers identified a number of elements that contributed to an effective apprenticeship programme.  These included:

·       A genuine business need for apprentices

·       Senior management sponsorship of the programme and local line management sponsorship of individual apprentices.  Line managers will benefit from preparation, clarifying their expectations of the apprentice role and how they will need to work with them, plus acknowledgement that they will need to invest time in supporting the apprentice.

·       A responsibly agreed salary.  

·       Good quality, relevant training and long term development opportunities.   This training could be provided internally with suitable accreditation or delivered by an external provider depending upon what best meets the needs of the organisation and fits within the Apprenticeship Levy requirements. One of the speakers identified that they needed to constantly work with their external training providers to ensure that the training meets their needs. It is essential that the training provided meets both the needs of the organisation and also the individual’s needs – this can mean tailoring the length of a programme to ensure that the pace fits these needs.  One of the employers was exploring the possibility of introducing degree level apprenticeships to meet organisational requirements, but also to stretch and reward individuals appropriately.

·       We heard about a range of exciting component parts of the programmes such as: including achieving a Duke of Edinburgh award; opportunities for volunteering/charity work; parents evenings to share with parents what the programme involves and the benefits to participants; and  possibilities for international links where organisations have international operations eg with Germany.   All of which help to build the confidence of apprenticeships, provide opportunities for team working and increasing responsibility plus times to celebrate these gains.

Benefits from apprenticeships

All the employers described the growth in confidence and skills shown by the apprentices – one said you can see them striding out across the workplace ‘with a sense of purpose’. 

But they also identified the benefits to the organisation particularly in relation to providing access to high quality candidates for junior roles. For example, one of the organisations described how the apprentices, when applying for roles within the organisation on completion of their apprenticeship, scored much higher than candidates from other sources and described how they had moved into much higher level roles than expected.  Another of the employers identified one of the challenges as being to remember that they are apprentices because they start adding value so quickly within their teams and they need to have their time protected to enable them to have the time to complete all their studies as well as their work.

Thoughts on the Levy

From the discussions at the session there are many different ways that organisations are approaching the levy:

·       For some it is business as usual – the organisation has already decided to invest in apprenticeships and nothing will fundamentally change.

·       Some organisations have considered the levy, but have decided not to bother with it and just pay the levy, seeing it as another tax, even though as a large organisation this will leave them with a large bill.  In an example shared during the meeting, the levy had been studied, but the organisation decided that it was not worthwhile them putting things in place to enable them to make use of the funding from the Levy. Interestingly, prior to the meeting, I had assumed that this was more likely to be the approach of small organisations, but this seems to be the case also for some large organisations.

·       Some organisations fear that the apprenticeship levy will absorb all the resources for training and that therefore all funding for learning & development will need to come through programmes supported by the Levy.  This view wasn’t expressed in the meeting, but I have heard it elsewhere.

·       A number of organisations in the meeting were identifying that they will only be able to spend a proportion (eg two thirds) of the funding for apprentices that their organisation will be eligible for, because not all costs are recoverable such as apprentice salaries.

·       Some organisations were still working out how they will approach the Levy and how this will affect their work with apprentices.

·       One of the opportunities touched on is the potential for organisations to work together  to deliver apprenticeships eg organisations from a similar sector either in partnership or perhaps a larger organisation opening up their scheme in some way to smaller organisations in the same field or within their supply chain particularly where this is in a specialist field.

Challenges with the Levy

One of the key challenges with the Levy for organisations is that there is still a lot of uncertainty about how various elements will work in practice.  A particular aspect of this is whether the relevant qualification frameworks for your organisation will be available in time – a large number of new frameworks are being developed quite quickly and there are some questions about whether the process for developing these has been sufficiently robust to ensure that each framework meets the needs of a sector and not just an individual organisation.   One of the employers shared how the Level 4 qualification that some of their apprentices need to move on to during the year is unlikely to be ready in time and what the implications of this are for those individuals.

A different issue was the opportunity to have apprenticeships not just for young people, but also for people of all ages, including apprenticeships to support career changes later in life.  Two specific challenges were mentioned in this connection, paying the right level of salary for this to be feasible and the issue of English and Maths qualifications in the final assessment process - older apprentices qualifications may be regarded as earned too long ago to be counted, meaning they may need to requalify in order to complete the apprenticeship.  This will need to be handled sensitively in order for this not to become a barrier.


The overall public perception of apprenticeships was discussed and whether the branding of apprenticeships needs to be changed or just our perceptions – the parents evenings mentioned previously and similar events could play a part in this.   Interestingly one of the employers describes their apprenticeship work under the banner of ‘emerging talent’, whilst other people suggested a broader skills development or grassroots programme as better labels.

Finally, we touched on a specific challenge in the public sector following on from the requirement placed by the government to have 2.3% of staff as apprentices, year on year.  This may contradict the advice that apprenticeships are most effective when they meet a real need within the organisation. 

There are clearly a great many benefits to be gained from a positive engagement with apprenticeships both for organisations and for individual apprenticeships.  However, there are many challenges to making the Apprenticeship Levy work both for individual organisations and in terms of its overall impact on the UK workforce and economy.   We are only at the start of identifying the what these challenges are, never mind finding the answers.

What issues has your organisation identified with the Levy?  How prepared is your organisation for April 2017?  Why not share your thoughts on this topic?

Rachel Burnham

12/12/16

Rachel is CIPD Manchester’s Public Policy Adviser in a voluntary capacity and is the Director of Burnham L&D Consultancy.

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals update and refresh their skills.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance.