Pandemic prompts new ways of working

The Open University Business School (OUBS) is a proud supporter of Learning at Work Week, the biggest festival of workplace learning in the UK. This is part of the School’s partnership with Campaign for Learning, a national not-for-profit organisation that promotes lifelong learning.

The Learning at Work Week annual awareness campaign has taken place every May since 1999. All this year’s winners show how organisations are using smart and creative ways to deliver learning and development and help people and business adapt to new ways of working, particularly as a result of the pandemic.

In 2021, the awards invited entrants to show how they inspired a lifelong learning culture, innovated in learning and development, supported business and organisational goals, or connected their people to virtual learning.

The Law Society won The Open University Business School Impact Award for Supporting Business and Organisational Goals. Those ‘highly commended’ were HM Courts and Tribunals Service, Ministry of Justice; HSBC; and Wakefield Council. Abcam; the Department for Work and Pensions; and Masonic Charitable Foundation and RMBI Care Co were all ‘commended’.

This year’s entries emphasised the vital role that learning plays in achieving organisational objectives, and crucially how learning together and from each other has an important influence on employee engagement which underpins success. In extraordinarily difficult times, when people may have felt isolated and detached from the workplace, the campaign was even more important and significant in 2021. Attracting attention, interest and creative ways to engage learners was what separated the best entries, over and above their interesting, diverse and engaging programmes.

The Law Society were our worthy winners for developing an interesting programme of events. They sought to not only to learn from previous years but also to really promote Learning at Work Week. Very well done to them and all those organisations who were in close contention.

Liz Moody
Director of Executive Education, OUBS