FOCUS INTERVIEW
David Sharp, CEO of International Workplace, explains to Sara Bean why continuous learning at
work is the best way to upskill FM personnel and improve their performance
The government’s plans to restrict
visas for lower-skilled, lower-paid
overseas workers as part of its drive
to move away from a reliance on using
‘cheap, low-skilled’ labour has raised
renewed concerns within the FM sector
on how it is going to fill cleaning,
security, catering and other frontline
jobs.
Within the cleaning sector alone, the
average figure for foreign-born workers in
the industry as a whole is 23 per cent, with
45 per cent of cleaning and housekeeping
managers and supervisors born overseas
(see References, note 1). Couple this with
the fact that almost a quarter (24 per cent)
of UK workers have undertaken no training
in the past year, with older, low-wage or
part-time workers the worst a ected, and
you see why the sector needs to look at how
it can better upskill its people (2).
The team at International Workplace
believe they’ve got the answer. The training,
consulting and development organisation
recently launched Workplace DNA, a
digital update service designed to promote
continuous learning at work. Crucially, it
is primarily aimed at those who are all too
o en le behind when it comes to learning
and development.
David Sharp, International Workplace
CEO, explains that it’s no coincidence the
company has taken this new approach.
“One of the reasons we developed
Workplace DNA was that for years our
clients would say to us, ‘this is our training
budget but we can only a ord to invest
it in a small number of people.’ As for the
rest, they’d tell us they badly needed to
train them, but the reality was that 98 per
cent of their workforce weren’t getting
any meaningful access to learning and
development.”
Sharp has been involved with FM,
health and safety and HR information and
28 APRIL 2020
development since the launch in 1995
of publishing venture Asset Information
(which would later become Workplace
Law). Its very first publication was a report
on the UK facilities management market. In
the early 2000s its range of online services
included a regular legal update email,
augmented by an online subscription
service that gave users access to reports,
advice and a chatroom.
The company expanded from publishing
into training, becoming accredited by
awarding bodies such as NEBOSH, CIPD,
ILM and IOSH. When its online publishing
model was undermined by the arrival of
free online content, the company shi ed its
focus to consulting and training, including
classroom training, before starting its first
e-learning venture in 2008.
While classroom training will always have
its place, explains Sharp, he could see from
those early days there was an opportunity
to merge the best of online publishing and
e-learning with the advantages of digital
and social networking. With a strong
pedigree in legal and practical publishing
– the company won a prestigious award
from the Periodical Publishers Association
in 2008 – Sharp’s confidence in its new
strategy was buoyed by its success at a
number of learning technologies awards
over the following decade.
With its Cambridge base providing access
to expertise in both education and
information technology, the team
wanted to go back to that original
challenge: how to help employers
give the same kind of learning
and development opportunities
to the 98 per cent of their
people who’d been missing
out.
“The idea goes back to
our original Workplace
Law Network, which was
at its best a community,” he says. “There was
a hunger for the information and advice we
were producing, with companies circulating
our materials widely to their people – but they
had no record of who’d read what. Even in 2007
we were thinking, wouldn’t it be good to have
some way of not just pushing content out, but
getting meaningful data back by developing a
two-way system? That way, an employer can
access and distribute valuable content, but
also track who’s engaging with it and measure
its impact on their organisation. That’s the
ultimate spark that
led to the
creation of