Public Sector Learning Solutions
Authored by: Nate Price-Whittle (Senior Manager - Health & Care Workforce).
These are exciting times, I think, to be working in learning and development (L&D) in the NHS.
There’s an opportunity right now for L&D professionals to redefine their roles, break down long-held operational silos, act with more strategic ambition and deliver the workforce their employers need for long-term organisational sustainability.
All of this stems from one thing: the NHS’ much talked about Long-Term Workforce Plan (LTWP). Break it down and every element of the plan comes with L&D requirements baked into it, making it a real gift to all ambitious L&D professionals.
It’s the first time we’ve had something like this which positions L&D and longer-term skills development as a solution to the NHS’s workforce challenges. It throws the door wide open for L&D teams to proactively outline their approach for supporting the plan, by mapping skills to organisational needs, rather than waiting for a revised mandate to come down from senior leadership.
Connect with us
- Find office locations kpmg.findOfficeLocations
- kpmg.emailUs
- Social media @ KPMG kpmg.socialMedia
Break it down
Looking at the three aspects of the LTWP, starting with the retention part, there’s a commitment to improving the employee experience through continued career development, making good on the NHS People Promise that its people should always be learning.
Within the training section, there’s talk of doing more with apprenticeships, increasing medical school places and thinking about a longer-term talent pipeline. And within the plan’s reform section, there’s plenty on reshaping the existing workforce to deliver the skills the NHS is going to need a few years down the line.
That’s all great but without L&D being fully immersed in every aspect of the plan, it simply won’t work. Nothing will really change. We’ll carry on as before – recruiting the same types of people, with the same skills into the same old roles – without taking the opportunity to transform how we undertake workforce planning.
Having worked in the NHS for more than 15 years in several different HR, L&D and organisational development (OD) roles, I’m still in touch with enough former colleagues to know that there’s a real sense of excitement about what the LTWP means for them. It’s their chance to show how they can act more strategically and with more of a long-term focus on workforce skills shortages and productivity. There’s no bigger opportunity than this to really make a difference.
Different times
Looking back on my time in the NHS, it’s remarkable to think how siloed we could be in L&D; set apart from our workforce planning or finance colleagues and rarely engaged in the business planning cycle. We were very operationally focussed and transactional in our thinking.
How we ran apprenticeship programmes is a good example of this. If we had, say, 200 places that could be funded by our Apprenticeship Levy, our aim was to make sure we filled all of those 200 places.
That was the right ambition to stimulate progress but what needed to underpin that was a strategic intent around who filled those places and how that responded to our workforce supply challenges.
Under the LTWP, that should change. If all the elements of OD are working together as they should, organisations should know where their longer-term skills gaps are likely to be. They should also know who the prime candidates are for being reskilled to fill those gaps by using one of those valuable apprenticeship slots.
Act now
That’s just one of many examples of how the LTWP could prompt some fresh, bigger picture thinking and new ways of working. But if the LTWP is to succeed – and we all hope it does – then L&D has to be factored into every organisation’s strategic workforce planning. People need to understand how it’s a vital enabler of everything the NHS has committed to within the plan.
Senior leaders must also acknowledge how so many of their biggest issues (from waiting lists to digitisation) come with wide-ranging workforce considerations which, in turn, require significant L&D interventions.
There are large parts of the LTWP that are unfunded, meaning organisations will need to repurpose existing budget to deliver it. That means there’s also a plea to those same senior leaders to do what they can to protect L&D budgets that are already under intense pressure and scrutiny. Those budgets are vital to delivering the workforce required for safe and sustainable clinical services.
L&D teams also need to be front and centre of this, analysing and monitoring the skills already within their organisation and showing how these can be redeployed around their organisation in different ways.
This is a unique opportunity to reset how L&D and OD engage with the rest of their organisation. What an exciting moment this is.
