The latest updates from Knowledgepool and Capita as we respond to the impact of the Covid-19 crisis.
This has been very much appreciated by our clients who have been able to continue ‘business as usual’ where appropriate.
While the benefits of virtual have been a great response to the necessities of the pandemic – the ability to keep safe, travel less, flex learning content and duration, along with opportunities for progressing CPD – these benefits have been matched by the more personal challenges that participants have been experiencing.
A large number of our learners are home schooling, and it can be hard maintaining the same level of focus in the home and virtually, where the ability to interact (and indeed for the presenter to understand the feel of the group) is greatly reduced.
Mix in the myriad possibilities around technical failings and ability to connect and the sudden shift to virtual, while an excellent ongoing response, is currently not without its challenges!
Even when social distancing is a memory rather than reality, working from home has great advantages to the employee; not only in terms of work life balance, but in terms of hard cash too – those annual season tickets often represent a large chunk of post-tax income, and who wouldn’t opt to live in a place of their choice, rather than dictated by work demands?
With the prevalence and rapid development of collaboration tools, there will be a large proportion of the workforce who will come in for the ‘human’ elements of relationship building and collaboration, rather than for the sake of it.
And of course, from the organisation’s point of view, working from home enables a tighter and more focused property portfolio. The pandemic has pulled the rug from under the feet of those who thought employees ‘couldn’t’ be trusted’ to work from home – there have been a number of studies which have demonstrated that productivity has gone up, not down, and with the increased use of technology, this data has been easier to tap into.
So, the move to virtual is clearly systemic in terms of workforce location, but how will this affect learning?
At Knowledgepool we moved over 90% of our catalogue to online delivery within a matter of weeks, and evidence from our clients is that while our supply chain are preparing for and many can now revert to face to face delivery, virtual will be a preferred option for some time to come.
This, combined with the increasingly sophisticated customer experience which our Learning Platform offers, means that technology will continue to change and drive the shape and content of learning.
From individual skills development through to professional qualifications, we now have an option for pretty much every eventuality.
Capita as a whole explored more than 100 situations where we were asked by the UK Government to support the Covid-19 response.
This has already included work for the NHS and other healthcare support: helping the NHS onboarding process for thousands of returning doctors and nurses; enabling government to communicate with and support vulnerable people during the crisis;
providing digital technology support to a London health trust; contributing resource to healthcare call centres; and being part of an initiative to set up health testing centres.
In Learning Services, our dedicated Health Team have been extremely busy over the past few months, as you can imagine!
Amongst other things, they have been working at extremely short notice to re-purpose Health Coaching programmes to support the NHS Primary Care workforce as a result of Covid-19, in an initiative led by NHS England & Improvement.
This has been so successful that a Phase 2 has been commissioned and is in procurement currently – it’s due to be the largest NHS programme ever with Knowledgepool and will start delivering sessions to frontline staff from July 2020.
The team have also supported the NHS by connecting them to the Senior Officer responsible for all Army Training to help facilitate the urgent creation of a “Managing Through a Crisis” programme which was rolled out in May.
This is delivering well already and has resulted in much-needed system-wide support for the NHS and frontline staff in general, with the creation of Leadership Circles and trained facilitators to deliver the programme to Trusts across the system at this crucial time. It augments the existing National Resilience and Wellbeing offer available for Primary Care staff.
To access our latest insight on the impact of Covid-19 and to find out more about how Capita is helping to shape tomorrow together, visit capita.com
With the the likelihood of a return to face to face in mind, over the last few weeks, our Supplier Management team have been focusing on working with our supply chain to understand their lock-down exit strategies and to refresh our supplier portfolio database.
We currently have over 300 suppliers who are able to deliver face to face learning and that number is growing daily.
Please bear in mind that there will be increasing requirements around risk assessments.
In particular we will be requesting location-specific risk assessments from clients before we can accept bookings for onsite events at your premises. A process is being finalised to clarify this which we will share as soon as it becomes available.
As a result of this it is likely that the booking process for both onsite and public events will take longer, as we will need to obtain and share both Client and Supplier risk assessments before we can finalise a face to face learning course.
For any enquiries or bookings, please contact the team:
Email: help@knowledgepool.com
Phone: 0203 429 7121
