Meet the Member: Learning and Development Consortium

For this month’s Meet the Member spotlight, we spoke to Graham Scott - founder and owner of the Learning and Development Consortium.

Can you briefly introduce us to the Learning and Development Consortium?

Learning and Development Consortium essentially runs as a membership organization across the UK, similar to the Foundation of Light’s corporate partnerships. We describe it as ‘a community of ambitious organisations learning and improving together’ and I’m really quite happy with that strap line.

We do a lot of benchmarking, where we’ll take organisations to see other organisations who are clearly doing some great work, to take inspiration and, as we call it, ‘steal with pride.’ We do a lot of that through Nissan in the North East. We also have what we call our ‘Best Practice Groups.’ One is around organisational culture; one is around safety in the workplace because we deal with some big manufacturing businesses; we have employee wellbeing; we have coaching and mentoring; the final area is around recruitment, selection, and onboarding.  We're very clear that the cultural thing really underpins all the work that we do.

Going back to the start, how did the foundation of the Learning and Development Consortium come about?

I've always been involved in learning and development throughout my career. I'm passionate about longer term learning as opposed to potentially one-off training courses, which often don't lead to change and improve performance. So I've always had that passion around personal development.

The whole thing actually started off in Scotland, believe it or not, whereby we had a group of different organisations in a room one day and Ron, who's still involved in the consortium, said: “Why don't we create a consortium of different businesses?” The passion is around learning and development, people reaching their full potential. I think that’s a big part of our background. 

Do you have any core values that guide the consortium’s decisions?

If we're selling the ideas of values and behaviours, we should have our own, and I believe that we do. The starting point is to try and make sure that everything we do is a great learning experience for the individual or the organisation, so it has real impact. We're not great believers in being in a classroom situation and presenting 50 PowerPoint slides, its about engaging people and making sure we deliver tangible outcomes. We are always working hard to create a sense of momentum and energy.

To back that statement up, every event and programme that we run, I'd like to think we're working hard to make sure that we follow that activity with the individual or the organisation. So, there's never anything in isolation, it's always leading to outcomes and progress. It's fine to invest in time and resources, but those are scarce, you just need to make sure you get a return on that. I think we have had some remarkable outcomes over the years.

Do you have any standout success stories or achievements from the Learning and Development Consortium that you are particularly proud of?

There are a number. I mentioned earlier we do a lot of work with Nissan. At their Sunderland plant, they have a safety dojo. My understanding is that dojo translates as a ‘place of learning.’  It’s a room where they'll have their ten safety behaviours dotted around and there are interactions and activities from a safety angle against each of the ten safety behaviours.  As a result of many of our members going along to Nissan, several have introduced their own safety dojo, which is excellent because obviously you're talking about keeping people safe and protecting lives. So that's one of the standouts for us.

How did your partnership with the Foundation of Light come about?

I've always been a Sunderland supporter and I've always admired the work that the Foundation has done over many years. My first contact was with a guy called Ken Teears who worked in the Foundation, he worked with us to run some CSR events. They were in the stadium at the time because the Beacon wasn't built then, and that's how it all first started really. That was LDC member organisations coming up to the North East and thinking about their strategies for supporting their local communities. That was a great starting point. Ken left the organisation, and we lost touch a little bit during Covid. Then about two years ago, I got in touch directly with Lesley and since then we’ve managed to get some great things planned, which means a lot to me because I'm a Sunderland fan.

What are some benefits of being part of the Learning and Development Consortium that may interest other Foundation of Light partners?

There's one in particular that Faye and I are working on. We run a programme called ‘Building for the Future.’  That's a six-month development programme for people in organisations who haven’t had much development but have shown lots of potential, such as leadership capability. Therefore, their organisation wants to invest in them. That six-month programme covers people's personal development, their personal brand, commercial and financial understanding at a basic level, tools and techniques around continuous improvement, and benchmarking visits to the likes of Nissan and other member organisations.

What I've agreed with the Foundation is that rather than those sponsoring companies pay us directly for the programme, we're handing all fees over to the Foundation, which I'm delighted to do. So, hopefully that will provide some fantastic outcomes to participants and we'll all benefit.

Is there a fun or interesting fact about your organisation that people might not be aware of?

I don't know about fun; I've just had the opportunity to build some really strong relationships. Many of the people in those organisations have become personal friends. I think that says something about your values, that we’re in this long term and building trust.