Revamping online learning at the Forward Trust

Claire Pulman, HR Learning and Development Lead at the Forward Trust, has transformed how online learning looks at the organisation. She shares her approach and the impact it has had.

Overview

Due to the nature of the Forward Trust’s work and the funding structure, there is a heightened importance for staff and volunteers to be compliant in certain areas such as Data Protection and Safeguarding. Completion rates are crucial and must reach 80%, which was a challenge in itself as this data was not readily accessible.

When I joined the organisation, other challenges I faced were:

Data was not readily accessible
Outdated eLearning courses
Lack of clear navigation around the platform
Very little engagement beyond induction
Reporting was an extremely manual task (HR advisors had to manually collate all the information and calculate the percentages of who had done which courses)

Staff members were also inputting their own training completion onto our HR system (and sometimes forgetting), which became problematic as we had two different systems where training was recorded.

My key objective was to revamp the learning portal to address these challenges.

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About Claire Pulman

After working in learning and development (L&D) for over 20 years, Claire joined the Forward Trust in June 2023 as their Training Lead.

Member fact file:

The Forward Trust helps people move forward from crime and addiction and their services are based throughout England and Wales. The organisation has over 800 employees and 200 volunteers and uses the learning management system (LMS) and eLearning provided by the Charity Learning Consortium.

First stage: Back to basics

I worked closely with the compliance team and scaled down the eLearning that staff members had to complete. To initiate this project we:

Curated content and created learning pathways
Put current training content into separate pathways and, with the help of Jamie Underwood (Support and Training Manager at the Charity Learning Consortium), we manually inputted the dates of the last completion. This was a time-consuming but essential task. It wouldn’t have been feasible to go out and start afresh.
Started the hierarchies from scratch
Suspended many accounts that had been inactive for a few years
Generally cleaned up the system

Things we needed to consider:

Employees’ workloads
The importance of ensuring that recent new starters had a smooth induction and it wasn’t to be disrupted by this project

This work set the foundations to enable a yearly completion reminder and robust reporting. Just as we got to this point in the project, Team Insights were launched by the Charity Learning Consortium. This was great timing!

Second stage: Setting up Team Insights

I set up Team Insights and rolled this out across the organisation. This included communicating to all our managers and training sessions to ensure they knew how to use the tool effectively, as well as determining the specific reporting requirements needed and intended recipients. For instance, we have a rehab centre in Wiltshire where the workers are under a different directorate, therefore I needed to adjust the hierarchies according to their needs.

At this point, managers now have a team overview of all the pathways that have been completed.

They can click on ‘View Report’ and this will give an overview of who needs to complete which training. See below:

There are actions down the right-hand side and the manager can click the person icon to view the user’s profile or they can message the user directly.

Managers can also go into the individual’s profile in further detail to see who needs to complete which pathways as well as when they are due to complete the courses e.g.:

We plan to enhance the reports section in the future, but for now, managers can access the RAG report and generate general reports in PDF, Excel, or CSV format, as shown below.

The dates are based on when users are required to complete their training pathways. However, the actual completion data is still tracked through reports in Site Admin. Additionally, reports are now set up to be emailed monthly, but managers can also log into the system and generate these reports whenever needed. During training sessions, managers were informed about this process.

I have worked with Ajay Dhalliwal, Membership Support Operative at the Charity Learning Consortium, to set up the compliance tab which allows us to see how compliant each team is in Safeguarding, Data Protection, and Health and Safety.

This tool is highly effective, using it as competition among the directorates. It encourages them to motivate their teams to complete their eLearning, as nobody wants to be called out for not participating.

As an organisation, we have increased our Data Protection completion rate from 30% to 95%. This improvement is crucial for maintaining existing contracts and securing new ones.

Third Stage: Collaboration

This phrase included working closely with our other training team, who delivers courses to our client-facing teams to provide a bookable system. When I joined, the existing process involved sending out emails with a list of the courses, which led to numerous exchanges attempting to schedule employees in for these sessions.

Now, employees can simply click on the bookable courses in the tab bar, select a course, and sign up for their preferred date. Their manager then receives an email to accept or decline the request.

This is then incorporated into reporting, allowing managers to access a courses tab where they can see an overview of how many courses have been completed by our Therapeutic Quality Training Team (TQT).

They can also dive deeper by navigating to ‘Site Admin,’ then selecting ‘Reports,’ where they will find the TQT report that they can access whenever needed.

The Challenges

As the system had laid dormant and underutilised, we needed to ensure that the eLearning modules were user-friendly and easy to complete. We encountered a bug within one of our external SCORM files, requiring us to assist numerous employees in navigating this issue. In the future, I would ensure robust testing before rolling this out.

Additionally, it took considerable time to verify the accuracy of the hierarchy data. As previously mentioned, we had to reorganise certain individuals to ensure that the relevant people could access their learning data.

A significant challenge we face is that our hierarchies are still being updated. We are working hard to ensure that we have a link to our HR System in the near future, to facilitate the data being pulled through.

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