What is Learning at Work Week?
Learning at Work Week is an annual event held in May since 1999 and organised by Campaign for Learning. The week-long event aims to highlight the importance and benefits of learning and development at work. This year, it runs from Monday 14th to Sunday 20th May.
Who gets involved?
All types of organisations are encouraged to get involved with Learning at Work Week. Some famous names include American Express and Debenhams. Whilst learning and development teams usually drive any activity, learners and learning providers also get involved.
Why should I get involved?
Learning at Work Week offers you the opportunity to run a branded campaign in your workplace. As a result of being linked to a national event, any marketing you do has lots of gravitas. Take inspiration from the hundreds of UK organisations already taking part in activities to promote a positive learning culture and engage employees.
Most importantly, you can make Learning at Work Week your own by using the opportunity as a marketing tactic for your staff’s learning opportunities.
How can I get involved?
There are hundreds of ways to get involved during Learning at Work Week. We’ve come up with some ideas below to get your brain whirring.
What’s this year’s theme?
The theme for this year’s Learning at Work Week is “Networked for Learning”. This focuses on the social and partnerships aspects of learning. This could include bringing colleagues together to learn from each other or organising networking events. To give you some more ideas about other ways you can “Network to Learn”, we’ve come up with 5 easy ways of doing so.
5 ways you can “Network to Learn”:
1. Host an event
Learning at Work Week gives you a great platform to generate awareness and organise an event (especially with these marketing resources). Let’s say you want to increase awareness of a certain learning topics, perhaps GDPR or the new Universal Credit system? Use the week as an opportunity to host a casual event within the workplace.
Put up posters to tell people what’s happening and where and give them reasons to attend. What will they learn? How will it benefit them? The best bit about running an event like this is you can utilise each individual employee to enhance the learning experience. How? Pose a question to the event attendees to make them think in depth about the learning topic being discussed.
For example:
“Now knowing the changes that the GDPR is going to impose on our business, how can you see this impacting your role?”
“How can we counteract this impact and ensure we are working in line with the legislation?”
Generate a discussion, encourage staff to take notes and encourage a positive networking learning experience.
2. Organise a ‘lunch and learn’ webinar
We all know that time limitation is one of the main barriers to getting staff to complete learning in the workplace. So why not quash this trend and set up a ‘lunch and learn’ webinar. Take a topic that you want your staff to learn about (and discuss) and put together a webinar. This could be a pre-recorded session, a live webinar or as simple as some PowerPoint slides covering key points.
Most webinar software have ‘chat’ functionality. Make this available to viewers to ensure your staff can network by asking questions and probe each other for thoughts and ideas. Organise the webinar during a lunch hour slot and encourage staff to eat their sandwiches whilst absorbing the learning available.
3. Learn from other organisations
Organisations are constantly offering out their knowledge and resources. Take advantage of this and share these opportunities with your workforce to ensure they benefit too. One of the easiest way of accessing free resources is by watching free webinars.
Hubspot offers tens of free webinars through the year. From eCommerce to LinkedIn, they cover a variety of topics to help develop your staff. Other options include Eventbrite, who list free events and webinars all the time.
4. Social networking (of course!)
We understand two types of social networking. The traditional type of attending social network events and the popular social media networking which we all do everyday without thinking. Put a focus on both of these during Learning at Work Week to get the most out of your employees.
If you have any networking events coming up, share the invite with relevant employees to give them a chance learn from other organisations.
Alternatively, take advantage of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn to reach your staff in new ways. One of the best times to engage with your employees is when they are sat on the sofa, relaxing at home. They aren’t stressed by their pinging inbox or endless calls. Therefore, they will take time to read the post about the upcoming learning event you’re advertising.
5. Keep it casual
Sometimes the pressure of having to complete compulsory learning or attend regular training puts staff off. Why not keep things casual by offering regular open sessions to allow for learning and development. For example, you could book out a meeting room/office space in your workplace and run different TED Talks videos each week.
Organising something regularly like this allows for a few things:
- You get to choose the topic – keep things relevant and in line with your organisations L&D goals
- Networking opportunities – putting staff in one room will encourage them to talk about the topic on screen
- Learning culture – getting staff used to this will generate a positive learning environment
So there you have it. Learning at Work Week 2018 is upon us and we hope we’ve inspired you to learn by networking. If you’ve got any ideas, questions or comments, feel free to contact us at hello@learningnexus.co.uk or fill in our contact form here.