Kibble is Scotland’s national specialist provider of services for young people. One of Scotland’s oldest charities, and today a leading social enterprise. It provides training for around 500 staff and 40 volunteers at three different sites. Read on to find out more from Fiona Sinclair, Employment Support Service Manager at Kibble.
Tell us about your eLearning journey at Kibble
Our eLearning journey is just beginning, but we hope to revolutionise our training through using this delivery method as part of our extensive training programme. At this stage we are picturing the finished article and planning how to enthuse staff about the place for eLearning in their everyday work.
How do you maintain a consistent approach to Learning?
We’re based in Paisley, Scotland – although we do have three separate sites where eLearning will be undertaken. The online courses will be developed by a team of three, working closely together to ensure each course is consistently suited to its audience as well as to the content. Whilst we want the series of courses to be connected in look and usability we also want each to be able to engage the user on its own merits – staff are likely to be taking a number of courses online so we don’t want them all to have the same format.
What’s your greatest eLearning challenge?
At this point, everything! We’re very excited about the work we are soon to undertake and I believe we will be able to meet our objectives as we have the full support of the HR department and senior management team. I suspect our biggest challenge will be to engage a large and demographically varied staff group.
Where do you get your ideas and inspiration for your role?
As many places as possible – other websites (not always eLearning), text books, TV shows, children’s books (often very creative in the transfer or knowledge), other training we have enjoyed ourselves.
Are volunteer’s part of your L&D strategy and if so how do you gain buy-in when there is no financial incentive for CPD?
Volunteers are very much part of our strategy and our volunteer programme is quite extensive with a rigorous recruitment programme. We find that buy-in from volunteers comes very easily – they know there will be a comprehensive training schedule, which is part of their role anyway, and their expectations of what that will entail are clear at the outset. I think given the nature of the work they are volunteering for i.e. working with vulnerable young people, makes them an enthusiastic bunch anyway!
What learning technologies are catching your eye and why?
We’re just starting to use Articulate Storyline which I am really enjoying. It seems very easy to use, it has loads of methods to convey content, and I particularly like that you can import existing resources from a number of other programmes. I am also very keen to make good use of tablet and smart phone technology in our programmes.
What excites you for the future of eLearning?
Everything! To be able to focus completely on this for the next few months makes it very appealing and working in a small team on a big project should allow us to be as effective as we can throughout the process.
What three tips would you share with others, from your experience?
- Get commitment from the top-down – it’s an expensive and time-consuming business to begin with
- Take advice from The Charity Learning Consortium staff and fellow charity L&D professionals
- Be prepared to fall off the wagon a few times! If you’re a member of the Consortium you’ll find that you’ll get back on more easily if you keep going to their Member Seminars.
What are the benefits of being part of The Charity Learning Consortium?
As well as the above, getting ideas, meeting others who have, or are currently facing, the same problems as you and getting resources from others who are delivering similar training are invaluable. Taking part in the Consortium’s Global Giveback project with Virgin Media is also really exciting – this has great potential to help us, with no financial outlay for the charity whatsoever.