Staff Development with Charles Booth

Mark Simpkins (00:03.286)
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of FE Gold, your source for real talk and real solutions in the world of further education. And I’m your host as always, Mark Simpkins, here to bring insights to take your provision to the next level. And today I welcome an ex-colleague and friend of mine, Charles Booth. Welcome to FE Gold.

Charles Booth (00:25.954)
Hey, cheers! Thanks for having me, eh?

Mark Simpkins (00:29.558)
That’s all right, mate. It’s good to see you. Thank you for taking your time to be here today to get stuck into another juicy topic in the world of further education. Before we get stuck into it, mate, do want to give our listeners a bit of an overview to who you are and what you do and where you are now?

Charles Booth (00:47.702)
Yeah, love to. Well, I always start with the first thing about me is I’m a recovering apprentice. I started my career having kind of left school, skiving the time I should be doing my GCSEs and things like that. So I like to run of GCSEs or anything like that. So I started as an apprentice and I liked my apprenticeship so much I kept going back for more and then ultimately ended up working as a trainer at the apprenticeship provider where I did my apprenticeship.

Since then, I’ve kind of not looked back. I’ve kind of loved the experience so much that I’ve gone through a couple of training providers. Most probably the three biggest one recently, did about five years at Total People doing like IT and digital marketing. Then we did about five and a half years at Apprentify doing a digital marketing and quality assurance stuff. And now I’ve landed at a multi-academy trusts doing apprenticeships for things like teaching assistant and, and all of the…

They’re the school’s business professional. All those things that all the roles that you see in schools that are kind of hidden behind the scenes doing apprenticeships for them as well. So very exciting stuff for me. Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (01:50.403)
Great, thanks for that mate. and obviously our kind of link ties up with our time together at Apprentify where, you know, obviously I was there as quality lead and you came in, I remember as your first kind of tutor, trainer, assessor, development coach, all of those, you know, great little job titles that we, I do, I remember it well, I remember it well and.

Charles Booth (02:03.361)
it.

Charles Booth (02:09.912)
Yeah, you interviewed me.

Charles Booth (02:14.716)
Eh?

Mark Simpkins (02:16.48)
Obviously a bit of time and stuff there, you joined our quality team and that as well. So that’s where the link comes for both of us in terms of history and stuff together. And today we’re going to talk a little bit about staff development. And one of the reasons I kind of brought you on Charles is that obviously we had a bit of a…

a staff development process, a staff development kind of policy and things that we did at Apprentice Five. But obviously with your suite of ITPs and stuff that you work for, I’m really interested into, obviously, I guess your views of being somebody in delivery in terms of, you know, obviously taking part in the CPD process and stuff that we have. But obviously, you know, as you’re moving into managerial roles and things, how your kind of viewpoint on

CPD now is across the ITP in general. So I’m delighted to have you here and to talk a little bit about it. So let’s make a start. Staff development in further education, right? What does that mean to you, buddy? And I guess what’s your current viewpoint as to why it’s such a hot topic?

Charles Booth (03:28.568)
Yeah, well, it’s interesting, particularly in education. have quite a lot of the education sector is quite set in its way. It’s almost very Victorian. And so I think why staff development is such a big topic at the minute as well is because people find that actually there is no such thing as just go to university, get this qualification, have this job. And then that’s it. You can ride in for the entire rest of your life doing that one job role.

And particularly, you know, certainly over the last kind of 10 years with, you know, the amount of kind of with work going remotely with social media and all those, all the ways that the, you you versus changing with, you know, I mean, pro start with the internet. Jobs aren’t the same as they’ve used to be. And I think education is tragically one of the sectors that’s really left itself behind. It’s really stuck itself in, you know, in the past a little bit with trying to cling with this old idea that a job’s for life and that a teacher will be a teacher for 40 years and then retire.

All those things. so where I’ve seen, one of the things I’ve seen from a business perspective, with training providers, particularly with some of the training providers that I used to work for that no longer exist. And looking at some of the training providers now that are huge, that are enormous. One of the big notable differences, a lot of the ones that kind of, you know, they don’t exist anymore, but the ones that are quite reluctant to move on. And when we say move on, we don’t mean, you know, adopting a new piece of technology or a new kind of, you know, thingamajig.

gadget that’s going to make it better. When they say move on, what they mean is collectively a group of people taking the step to develop themselves, to step into the 21st century and things like that. And the difference between those that seem to have risen to the top, the ones that have really taken over the show, I won’t mention any names. Wait, what am saying? My company right now, the reason why, I mean, I’ll say for Lyft schools where I work now, we have a Google education.

Mark Simpkins (05:13.378)
Yeah

Charles Booth (05:19.234)
You huge Google education providing, we’ve got this huge network of, of tech, tech learning technologists that, you know, bring out Google classroom and all the schools and things like that. And those organizations that are really, you know, you know, pushing forwards that are staying in business, staying profitable, but also delivering a really high quality service and making the difference. The ones that actually they’ve seen the problem or they’ve seen the opportunity in whether it’s technology, whether it’s a new process, whether it’s just in the, you know,

a cultural thing, they’ve seen an opportunity in something and then they’ve actually taken steps to move collectively as a group to get their own staff, teams of the staff to become champions in something and kind of drive their departments forward and develop each other. I think whereas with things like manufacturing, know, the machine is the machine and the human being has to learn a machine. That’s it. They tick the box and off they go, push the button off they go. Education is very much based around the human being.

You can’t just have a machine that does it. The human being needs to be the one and actually staff development, whether we cut, whatever we call it, whatever name we give for it. It’s at the heart of that. The only way to move forward in society or technologically or whatever it might be is to kind of embrace that there’s new stuff to be learned and it’s not replaced. It’s not saying that you’re old-fashioned and therefore you should be redundant and kind of retire early. It’s to say, actually, things are going to keep moving forward. You should just get used to moving forwards and embrace.

culture of staff development. What do think of that for a rant?

Mark Simpkins (06:51.617)
Yeah, yeah, no, that’s only thing is you, you mentioned, we, you know, I’ve, I’ve got a pod that’s coming out soon, in relation to safeguarding. we talk about a culture of safeguarding, right. And you just mentioned there a culture of staff development. guess what I’m interested in is because you’ve done delivery and you’ve done quality roles within, within, know, providers, how important is staff development to staff?

And I know that may sound like a really stupid question because you may come out and just go, well, you know, it’s fundamental. All staff want to develop. They all want to be able to be better at their jobs. But you know what? What’s funny is that when, you know, in the clients that I work with, actually there are some people who are absolutely like that. But there are some staff also that actually, you know, they don’t take the opportunity.

Charles Booth (07:40.686)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (07:46.307)
to develop, they almost go, I’ve reached a certain level, I know I’m good at this and I don’t need to do anything else. So I guess, for yourself personally, how important was staff development? How important was your development to you in terms of actually putting the time aside to do impactful CPD?

Charles Booth (08:00.088)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (08:06.228)
Yeah, do you know, it’s probably like it’s an attitude thing. And I think it’s very much in response to people around you. And if I think about, you know, with when I was at Total People, I kind of went at Total People at the start of my time at Total People. I thought I was the expert. You know, I went in thinking I was the big brain and all the sort of stuff and I could do this, that and the other. And we had this printing qualification that was built and I thought, right, I’m the master of everything. I don’t need to learn anything. And and and because of the nature of the, you know, the department that started with

You know, it kind of let me think that and let me kind of be like that. And actually that wasn’t really constructive. It really took, it took another manager, um, coming on and actually not necessarily poking flaws and everything, but to say, well, actually we can all. I don’t know. We can all grow and actually it’s not about kind of, must do course X to, you know, tick off your prevent training or to do your, you know, your safe guy. wasn’t about that. It was more about kind of.

acknowledging that actually the company, no company’s perfect, things need to happen, know, gaps need to be filled. Sometimes there’s a skills gap for something if somebody leaves or goes on maternity leave or anything like that. And actually it’s about kind of accepting that it’s probably more around accepting that work is more fluid than it is kind of rigid. And where you’ve got, you know, one of the nice things about, you know, working in the quality team at Apprentify with yours.

with yourself is that actually, you know, one of the, one of the cultural, one of the cultural sayings behind that whole company was the idea of celebrating mistakes. You know, the idea of actually, you know what, it’s a brand new company. Things aren’t ready yet. You know, and you don’t make a mistake unless you’ve done something right. And so it was that culture of, you know, taking little steps or trying to find a way and acknowledging that things aren’t right. And when you kind of, that’s kind of like defining what the problem is and you can’t solve problems until you defined it.

And think with staff development, staff development is very much a solution to finding a gap or finding a problem and where the kind of the negative attitude is, where you think, actually there are no problems and we’re perfect in every way. Nothing needs to change. We can stay right here and everything will be fine forever. But the reality isn’t, you know, it’s not that black and white. I think in reality, we have to acknowledge that actually things are moving forward and things do change and teams change and people grow and all that sort of stuff. And.

Charles Booth (10:29.738)
Acknowledging that allows you to see the gaps that makes you it more It makes me when I’ve been in a team like that where it’s being encouraged where I’ve been encouraged to accept that things aren’t perfect now and that things can grow or things can change I’ve been much more open to change and open development and I say that because I’m the sort of person when someone says Charles go to this course. I’m like absolutely not. I’m very busy I’ve got a lot of things to do. It’s like but Charles. I’ll make your life easy. I don’t care I’ve got the stuff to do, you know it but when somebody says right

This is where we go in, in too much time, we need to be here. What we’ve got right now isn’t going to get us there. It kind of refames that whole situation. So I think, okay, well, I can sacrifice me, my idea that I’m really busy this week, because if I want to get to that place over there, I need to develop it. suppose it’s a long winded way of saying it’s reframing your attitude around this idea that things aren’t perfect right now. Things are growing things, you know, things are developing and therefore.

we should develop with them and kind of accept that that’s okay. And when I’ve been in a place or with people who think like that, I very much clung onto that. When I’ve been in a place or a group of people who say, no, this is a system and this is right. And this is, this is the way we do things. We’ve always done it this way. Then I’ve found myself almost responding the same way. So, no, I can’t do that. I’ve always done it this way. So it’s very much being a reflection of the people who’ve been around me. That’s why it needs to be a culture because you can’t really be the one person shouting about it all by yourself, I guess.

Mark Simpkins (11:57.251)
So whose responsibility do you think it is, staff development? Is it a business organisational thing or is it an individual thing or is it a mixture of the two depending on the business and individual?

Charles Booth (12:10.094)
Yeah, I mean, it definitely starts at the top. If you’ve got resistance at the top, you’re not going anywhere, haven’t you? think there’s no escaping from it. It always starts at the top. The top needs to be of that mindset. And yeah, that’s almost like a yes, no test. It’s tremendous. That’s one of the ways I judge a company, one of the ways I judge, you know, if I was applying for a job and I was sat in the interview and I look at the person sat across from me and think to myself, you know, are they the sort of person who is open?

Mark Simpkins (12:17.858)
Mm.

Charles Booth (12:39.694)
to change open, if they’re open to developing their company, then they’re definitely open to developing me as a member of staff. Do you know what mean? So that’s one of the ways that I personally judged one and encourage all the people to judge them. So I think, yeah, you can’t avoid starting at the but at the same time, don’t think organizationally everyone can move together. One thing I quite liked about, you know, going back to, you know, total people, thinking about my time there was, that was quite a large organization with lots of loads of departments.

One of the things that they did with maths and English, which is always a challenging subject in most kind of, you know, training fires, you all have the issue with maths and English. One of the ways of kind of supporting that was to try and get help from all the trainers by set by kind of getting one person in every department to be a champion of maths and English. And so rather than having, right, everyone’s got to do maths and English and everyone’s going to do some embedding and everyone’s going to do this course and we’re all doing it or else it became a case of

Okay. All the managers were told to, you know, pick a champion to, you know, to take on the subject and then in their team meetings to allow that champion sometime to feed back to the rest of the team about how they’re moving forward and almost, you know, kind of it’s like gorilla tactics, you know, almost like sneaking it, you know, pushing forward from within, sneaking forward from within, you know, selecting a champion to lead the way and letting other people come through. We’re thinking about lift schools. have these learning technologists who do.

you know, wondrous and fantastic things on Google Classroom. you know, some schools, some teachers have been doing a long time, you know, they’re not, they’re probably not going to be as keen listening to somebody like me preaching at them on the internet about how to use all this stuff, because I do it all the time and aren’t I great. But somebody in their school, somebody works closer to them, someone they’re friendly with saying, actually, I’ve come up with really good way of doing this particular specific thing using Google Classroom. They’re far more willing to listen. I think it kind of

know, yeah, there’s two sides to it. think you got, it’s got to come from the top. But also I felt the way that I’ve enjoyed the most to say, has been where you’ve had a champion lead in it and has been able to kind of share it from within and kind of standardize it out. So you’re not taking a whole company in one go, but you’re bringing the company forward in lots and lots of small places who can then, and you know, I guess all those champions could all meet together and all those champions can kind of

Charles Booth (15:01.746)
together those are the ones who i’m guessing as well i’ve got to be the people who are automatically keen on the subject and already want to be part of it too so i suppose there’s an element in there of how do you get people to want to be champions but that might be a haven’t got an answer for that yet that might be a different question altogether yeah

Mark Simpkins (15:20.662)
Yeah, that’s interesting. So I kind of agree with you. know, for me, for me, I think it kind of all stems initially from a self-assessment slash evaluation type process, because, you know, I think if an organization can, you know, engage in a process where, and you’ve already talked about identifying gaps and stuff, right. And I think as a business, if you go through a self-assessment process,

You identify your gaps, you identify where as a business you need to improve. And then that kind of then knocks down to perhaps your next kind of layer, which may be a department, right? Or it might be a team or whatever. And then that kind of stems down and go, right, if you self assess and self evaluate your team, where are the team gaps? And you perhaps can then create a kind of CPC strategy or start development strategy off the back of what that team requires.

Charles Booth (16:10.219)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (16:18.548)
And then it gets knocked down again, right? And it might get knocked down to either expertise or job roles or individuals. And then it’s about then what are the gaps that the individual has in order to be able to then go on and improve and have start development. So I think it’s kind of like a cascading kind of knockdown effect that starts at the top with having a process, right? And, you know, because obviously that

Charles Booth (16:37.88)
Yeah.

And don’t you think in that the same?

Don’t you think in that as well? There’s kind of like an element of the organisational mass to be quite honest as well with itself. know, to like, you know, what do we actually want? What are the things that actually wind us up? What are the things that, you know, we actually want to help with? self-assessment sometimes we think things like SARS and quips and all that sort of self-assessment stuff. Sometimes it’s done behind closed doors and nobody hears anything about it. It almost takes an element of being quite open about it.

Mark Simpkins (17:12.564)
Yeah, absolutely. You need…

Yeah, of course, you need to have an effective and honest self-assessment process to be able to do that. Absolutely, fundamentally. And everybody involved as well with that inclusivity around people being involved within that process. yeah, I mean, but I think I guess where I’m tying this to is that what you’re saying about it all happens at the top. So to have that, that process, that open and honest and the culture that you talk about enables and allows that to happen.

And identifying those gaps is fundamental to being able to plug them with effective staff development. And what I’m kind of finding is when I go out into clients and there’s almost a different staff development viewpoint for those involved in delivery from those that are what you would call, I guess, support staff or

Charles Booth (17:40.525)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (18:07.16)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (18:07.362)
you those that are in sales and stuff like that. And I guess my next kind of question to you is in relation to that, because, you know, is that effective having perhaps maybe a slightly different viewpoint for both or actually it’s all part of the same process.

Charles Booth (18:22.734)
Yeah, I think there’s an element of culture in there because if you imagine with your delivery stuff your training stuff And quite often, I mean they’re in the they’re in the game of development anyway, aren’t they? And so, you know, there’s a I mean we can give them jip we can say well, they’ve been teaching for so long So they’ve forgotten how to work in the real world and that’s true and I relate to that and i’ve always kind of struggled that particularly working in tech stuff And so there’s element of force in them to do it But also they’re probably more willing to kind of learn on the grounds or the more

willing and aware of the need to learn because that’s part of their role. Whereas, you I think of, you know, a couple of people we’ve worked with, you work and say, you know, take like compliance departments, people working in, you know, like MIS, that sort of stuff, working with technology. They don’t think it’s not part of, there’s no natural cultural place for them to kind of think about the idea of development and staff development and

And even though there’s a billion things I could rattle off the top of my head that would be useful for them, that maybe they go, yeah, it’d be great idea. I’d love to go and do that. Because it’s not kind of part of the culture of the people in those roles. Sometimes it’s missed out. And I also think with when it comes to hiring and people come to like, you know, taking on people to fill those roles. What’s interesting in like, in any company’s mainstay role, there’s almost like a career trajectory. You start off in one place, you move up to this most moving, because that’s the main part of the role, but all the support roles.

Because it’s not part of the main state, it’s not part of the thing that people recognize. know, they, they, they don’t think of progression routes. just go, we are, we need, we need an administrator who can run this system. We need a data person who knows how to use Excel. And those, those two conversations will be, we need a different person to do this, but we’ll be a different person to do that. And there’s very, it’s not kind of, it’s almost, there’s no.

obvious reason to go and think, Oh, actually, this person in the one team could actually go and learn this thing on Excel. Do know what I mean? There’s no natural link to it. And that’s the sort of thing probably takes a bit of outside influence, you know, from, you know, some like yourself, you know, somebody like, you know, from your Mox dead or from your, you know, your actual off stead. It takes somebody externally really to point some of that sort of thing out sometimes as well. But I can think of an example. I remember having, there was a, again, going back to a printify, you may remember this, there was a, when

Charles Booth (20:42.094)
When I was there at the start, there was a real need for automation. And I remember getting really irate and like angry about this ex-handbooking system. And it was all manual and irritating. And I remember, you know, like, I remember spitting with rage at some point over trying to, you know, get an ex-handbook for one learner who’s just been a bit difficult. And after all the arguing and all of the kind of the, it all simmered down, someone came up with this lovely idea of using a tool called Power Automate, fail in a form.

books the exam for you job done no messing around no human interactions just fill in form does the rest for you and it’s like oh wicked you’ve got this power automate thing and then at some point a little bit later on you know the uh the guy you’d come up with the power automate thing in the first place has gone oh there’s only me who knows how to use this what happens if something happens to me what if i clear off and then and then you know i was in the right place at the right time someone said oh charles you should have a go at this power automate thing and you know i had a you know

Mark Simpkins (21:31.074)
Mmm.

Charles Booth (21:39.052)
best hour of CPD of me life, learned this wonderful automation tool that’s benefited me for the rest of my working life. Do know what mean? And just over one thing, but it’s almost, yeah, the culture to the, you know, the culture or the kind of the thoughts to go, right, what are all these business needs? People often think, well, we need to get a person in to do that. You forget that, you know, most, many companies have got hundreds of years of experience within their company that might fill that role already.

or might need the tiniest little update to fill that role without having to go and hire someone else. But it’s not always obvious. And so that’s where you kind of your openness about that self assessment probably needs to come in or perhaps even just, you know, when you have if you would have, let’s say a monthly brief briefing at the start of the week or something like, here’s what we’re doing for this next month. by the way, we’re really looking for somebody. It might be going to put a roll out or it might be really looking for somebody who can, you know, work out how to do a stupid thing on Excel.

If anybody knows who wants to help, give us a shout. All that sort of stuff. Just being open with those kind of business needs, probably open to sort of staff development also secretly some members of staff probably want. I was really just thrilled to go and play with Power Automate. You know, it looks kind of silly. It has, it’s, I’ve used it for the entire rest of my life. The idea of automation has changed the way I think about work and I’m a lazy man.

So it makes my life easy. I’ve got this opinion of, know, somebody who’s lazy, who knows how to automate is the most dangerous man on planet earth because they will make the whole world run on the computer. know? So yeah, but it took somebody to kind of put that need out there in the first place for me to have possibly the one of the best pieces of CPD of me life.

Mark Simpkins (23:10.028)
Hahaha

Mark Simpkins (23:23.234)
Cool. I’m going to ask some quite direct questions now. Okay. So I’m going to start off with, okay, who’s responsible for staff development, staff CPD? Is it HR, line managers, quality?

Charles Booth (23:28.546)
Go for it.

Charles Booth (23:44.386)
Hmm

I would put it with the quality team. Not everyone has a quality team, do they? And I think it’s the, you know, it’s that it’s the best, nice to have. I would put it with the quality team. At the very least, there should be a quality function within line management. Because, yeah, they hate, mean, HR, they’re there to tick a box. And in reality, no one’s particularly enthused about, you know, say if they’re doing the thing, they’re the ones who organize the things that they’re doing. But HR.

Mark Simpkins (23:52.279)
Right?

Charles Booth (24:13.922)
They’re not looking forward to the future and how’s the company going to develop moving forward, but your line management and your quality team or whoever else fills that slot, that entrepreneurial division of the, of the senior management team, those are the ones who’ve got their eye on the future. And it should be the people who looking at the people look into how the company grows. Those are the people who should be, you know, directing that staff development or at least outsourcing it to line managers to say, right, we want to go over here to get everyone trained up on.

Google Classroom.

Mark Simpkins (24:46.915)
That is a great answer. It wasn’t an easy one. Because I think there’s little percentages across the three. So I think quality is perhaps best placed to pick up those gaps. Because through their scrutiny and through their observations and through their sampling and all the bits that they should be doing as part of their support, they are best placed to identify gaps and perhaps best placed to then to deliver.

Charles Booth (24:49.174)
Yeah. You got to say, is that the right answer?

Mark Simpkins (25:13.65)
know, specific CPD in different topics that they’re competent to. think that line managers need to come into this because they are essentially judging the performance of an individual. And if they are not doing their CPD, then actually that forms part of that performance related discussion. And HR quite often are the department that

as things and keeps on top of the fact that things are being updated and ticked off and things like that. you could argue that, you know, actually, if there is and we’ll come on to capture the CPD in a minute, that they are the ones that are checking that CPD logs are updated and they have sufficient detail and things in there and so on and so forth. So I think you’re right. I think a huge chunk of it does sit within quality because they have the time as part of their role to identify those gaps and train and fill those gaps.

Charles Booth (25:58.67)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (26:06.656)
So that was quite direct. was meant to be. But what? OK. So in terms of CPD now, there are huge amounts of forms of CPD, so many. There’s ones that deliver internally and externally. There are ones that you go in face to face and online and you can read articles and listen to videos and so on and so forth. Right. So in terms of and then there’s let’s throw in mandatory. And

Charles Booth (26:06.776)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (26:18.382)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (26:35.032)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (26:36.353)
voluntary, right? So in terms of this whole suite, you your probable answer back is, it depends on the individual, it depends on how they best learn, it depends on what it is that they want to do and how big a thing it is. But you know, I, for you, you know, I guess individually and personally, you know, in terms of CPD, what gets you excited if you

Charles Booth (26:38.008)
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Simpkins (27:00.481)
you know, asked to go and do something, what form, what type, what, you know, how is it delivered? Is it better that you get somebody externally in because you’re used to hearing somebody’s voice or so on and so forth? you know, what’s the best concoction, do you think?

Charles Booth (27:07.854)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (27:13.678)
Yeah, well, I think it’s it’s always been if i’m gonna if it if the whatever the the train is if it’s been put in there in the enough enough You know if it’s been sold to me that i’m going to be doing this tomorrow And that this is a situation that’s really going to happen or better Yeah, if i’m if i’m physically doing the cpd the way i’m going to do it tomorrow Those have always been the best They’ve always been the best kind one of the things i quite like if it takes a week dry like safeguarding the idea of a safeguarding scenario

It’s a really interesting way of teaching safeguarding because like everyone can imagine the scenario happening. And in a lot of cases, people have been in that scenario just saying, oh, right. Well, we’ve got to, these are the types of abuse that can happen. Hooray. That’s quite a dry and horrible subject, but framing it from the point of view of, okay, this is what happens to X, Y, and Z, or this is what’s happening to X, Y, and Z. What do we do next? And almost throwing you in the deep end. I’ve always found them to be the best type. I do like.

I don’t like the idea of doing it when you’re at the desk doing your normal job and you know when you’ve got that space where you could just click through and I’m thinking yeah I’m gonna put a self reflection on it and of course I am click click click click as fast as I can if it was important and meaningful I do think that there ways that are perhaps more wrong the best way that’s worked for me when I’ve

picks up office has almost been taken out of my regular workplace situation. What’s an apprenticeship language you might call off the job, who’d have thought it, but being taken outside of my regular situation, even if that’s moving literally from, when we, when, you know, when we used to meet them, you know, in the quality team, when we’d go into a different room, go and find like a meeting room, a break room or something like that away from the normal run of work. and then putting yourself in that slightly different situation, that’s always been the best time to do.

some kind of CPD that usually involves getting an external person in. But I don’t think it has to be that. think just by situating yourself ever so slightly outside of your regular working role is enough. If you’re in a meeting room or if you’re, you know, just sat around the whiteboard or whatever it might be, they’ve always been that that’s always they’ve always been the places where I’ve gone from kind of 5 % attention to 100 % attention. And that’s probably the

Mark Simpkins (29:33.718)
Mm-hmm.

Charles Booth (29:34.914)
for like me who is easily distracted, if I’m sat at a computer and I’m going to do it self-directed, you know the second my little message thing pops up that I’m going to be answering messages and ignoring it. And then I’ll get to the end of the day and go, gosh, I haven’t finished that job off yet. Quick, click, click, click, click, click, click, click as fast as I can get it done. Yeah. Anything away.

Mark Simpkins (29:53.379)
So, so, yeah, so, interestingly, if you kind of wrap up all the things that we’ve been talking about already. Apply in apprenticeship principles.

Charles Booth (30:07.459)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (30:08.352)
you know, at the start, skill scan, gap analysis, this is my job role. These are the things that I want, I need to, you know, knowledge, skills and behaviors that I need to know to be able to do that effectively. If I aspire to want to go up to the next level, become a leader or stuff like that. So skill scan, gap analysis, and then effective kind of teaching and learning through different forms, whether it be e-learning, like, you know, sessions, protected time.

Charles Booth (30:34.232)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (30:34.719)
Okay. And then tracking of progress, which is captured and so on and so forth. When you think about it and you think about all those things that we sort of said would be good practice, it’s like being on an apprenticeship. It’s not funded and it’s not, you know, it’s not ESFA governed or also, but it’s, if you apply those principles in reality, when you look at it, it’s almost like being on an apprenticeship because all of the things that you, you know, you do as part of that, actually, if you apply it to staff development,

Charles Booth (30:47.438)
Yes, it is.

Mark Simpkins (31:04.492)
You can’t get far wrong, right?

Charles Booth (31:06.124)
Yeah, yeah, because you’ve got to do it as well, haven’t you? With an apprentice, you do it and you don’t do staff development for fun. You do it because you’re to do it as well. I mean, we’ve just tied it to the apprenticeship as well. If you read like, I read Traction fairly recently and there’s a couple of like other business books and they all follow the same format and they all have a bit and they always say spend time working on the business as you do in the business. You know, what we apply in apprenticeship land is the same thing that any, you know, high octane business consultant is applying.

Mark Simpkins (31:14.114)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (31:34.99)
to all these kind high octane CEO board meeting development things to sell multi-million pound companies, et cetera, to develop huge organizations. it’s the same principle. Whether we apply it for just you and me, apply it for apprenticeship, we apply it for a massive business. Those same principles, self-assessment, setting the time aside, applying it in real life. It’s the same. It is a fundamental, isn’t it? It’s the same across the board.

Mark Simpkins (32:03.682)
Well, there’s the answer then. We just put everybody on an apprenticeship, whether it’s funded or not, and then we’re good to go.

Charles Booth (32:08.662)
Yeah. And if we can make it funded, extra, that’s even better, right?

Mark Simpkins (32:12.974)
Yeah, well, that’s right. That’s true. That’s true. That’s true. So let’s just talk a bit about impact because, know, in terms of obviously, you know, when the call comes and offstead come, they will they will talk about CPD. They will want to see records. They will want to speak to staff about what they’ve done. you know, ultimately, though, they’re interested on impact. So how do you think you how can you effectively measure the impact of CPD?

Charles Booth (32:34.862)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (32:41.9)
Yeah, you know, that’s the I just went I think having been on the receiving end of us that have quite a few times and having, you know, having had them try and grill me for information, all that sort of stuff. It’s always been useful to have had really, you know, big development days or big conference days. You know, Apprentifier, we used to run the development day where we’d, you know, take some time to do some really big and meaningful specific sticks in your memory.

And when we’re at total people, used to do like every, you know, like six months, they’d have a big conference day and whatever you do, it really, stick in your memory. It’d be, you know, it would be quite, yeah, you couldn’t escape for it. So whenever they asked the question, you automatically go straight to the big development day you’ve just done. You know, they are like, if you, if you want to, a lot of punch in a small amount of time, that’s, you know, those development days are the big ones because even whether they recorded anything or not.

They’re going to tell the offset inspector to their face. They’re to say, yeah, we did this development day on this. And they might say it was rubbish, but they’re going to have, you know, several subjects that we did on that development. It’s got to be memorable, you know, and maybe the individual member staff doesn’t need to log it in their own personal CPD log because the company says we do X development days every year and we cover this, this and this. it’s part of our culture of development, you know, and perhaps you can get away with it. think when it comes to personal stuff, it is, it is tougher, but the, I think it comes down to where.

Mark Simpkins (33:45.217)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (34:04.394)
It’s perhaps easier to measure someone’s progression in a job role. So I think from a print of I, when I started doing, you know, like the train and the coaching first, and then going into the quality role and let’s say if someone’s going to grill me on that, how did, you know, what we, how we sport and now we could talk about, you know, there’s various different stages of training. And again, like just within the team, there was team training, you know, we did that training on like deep dives and we did some other stuff, you know, having, you know, yeah.

team training where you’re all doing things together. Again, it’s less reliant on somebody having a Word document and keeping a dear diary today. I learned about spreadsheets, but having a, you know, something that’s a bit more team focused probably makes it easier to log. I think actually, how many of us did inspectors read through an individual CPD log and go, ah, that must’ve been good. I think it’s quite questionable. think the, I think the broader strokes is, I think it’s better.

to do meaningful, big, important training as a group that, that a manager can stand and say, in our team, we did this, ask them anything. We did this and now they have to go and do it in their role. did this day of training on a software. They all use the software. We did a day of training on deep diving. Now they’ve all done a deep dive each and this is the result. You know, I think it’s far more easier, easier to report on big, meaningful and impactful training like that than perhaps individual one-to-one training. The stuff that’s mandatory.

the stuff that you know historically I’d have put in a spreadsheet like oh to this day I still can’t see any value in it in real life it’s nice to tick the box I know you need it but in terms of you know in terms of actual impacts I haven’t I don’t I don’t know there might be a better way maybe it’s an appraisals or you know like your annual appraisals

Mark Simpkins (35:48.406)
Yeah.

Essentially.

Yeah, essentially the mandatory stuff is, is refresh. That’s basically all it’s there for. It’s just a refresh and redrog and recap like you would do if you were delivering training and you needed to do a recap on what did we do two months ago, four months ago, six months ago, eight, you know, that that’s all it’s there for. And if there’s been a change in legislation and things that that that becomes then impactful because then you need to know that new information from when you were last certified. Right. So there is value in it, but quite

Charles Booth (35:59.234)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (36:15.278)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (36:24.322)
different.

Mark Simpkins (36:24.77)
you know, rarely do you get an awful lot out them. And let’s face it, a lot of these systems that are out there where you’re doing e-learning, you can pretty much just flick straight to the end quiz and you can probably pass with a 60, 70 % pass rate, which is crazy in my head, right? If you’re doing safeguarding, how you, when you do an assessment, you don’t need to get 100 % in order to pass is mind blowing in my mind, but there we go.

Charles Booth (36:39.234)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (36:50.67)
Yeah, perhaps there’s like an apprenticeship principle in there. You know, with the apprenticeships and other things that you do, you have to do a progress view every like 12 weeks and 10 to 12 weeks. Perhaps there’s something in that that may be the best way to record staff development is through the equivalent of if you had like a kind of a quarterly, you know, personal development plan where again, you had to stand in front of your manager and say, right, these are the things I’ve been doing this month.

Mark Simpkins (36:59.939)
Mmm.

Charles Booth (37:18.946)
How you been getting on with them? Been all right. What was the value of it? This bit was useful. That bit I used, that bit was rubbish, but at least you’ve got a record then quite regularly of, you know, a quarterly conversation. Perhaps that’s more, I must admit my opinion on training is that people don’t really pay a trainer to learn new stuff from them. They probably pay the trainer more to be accountable to them for the things that they’ve learned themselves. And so perhaps there’s…

Mark Simpkins (37:20.247)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (37:48.14)
I like maybe it says me being fundamentally lazy. If you’ve got it in a progress view or a personal development plan or quarterly appraisal, that sort of thing, because you’re accountable to another human being. One, you’re to think about it and worry about it because, you know, you don’t want the boss to think you’re a slacker, right? But the other thing is you’re probably going to pay a little bit more attention knowing that somebody else is going to, you know, know that someone else has got a vested interest in your development too. Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (38:13.25)
And I just want to tie that in because a couple of the clients I’ve worked with recently, do peer CPD and peer learning so much better than others. Cause I think everybody loves the idea of a buddy system or something. But in reality, this whole thing about, haven’t got enough time, right? Always comes into play. It’s always, it’s the worst thing when it comes to CPD. I haven’t got enough time. Even if you give them protected time, they end up using that time not to do CPD, funny enough. But those that effectively have a buddy,

Charles Booth (38:25.432)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (38:33.261)
Yeah

Mark Simpkins (38:43.043)
somebody who they go to and they don’t really necessarily think of it as CPD, but they just come here, can you just watch for like 20 minutes and just give me a bit of feedback and stuff on that? And then they work together on what went well. And then they go, oh, what about this idea? Have you shared this? Have you done this? And when you start bouncing ideas and innovation and creation off of each other, you’re more likely to take risks because you’ve got someone there covering your back. You know, if I try this, do you just sit there and just make sure that if it all goes wrong, you can jump in and help whilst I try and fix X, Y or Z and…

Charles Booth (39:04.227)
Yeah.

Charles Booth (39:12.418)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (39:12.544)
you know, actually there’s some superb little buddy or peer learning, you know, and again, we talked about it being linked to apprenticeships. How often do we go, right? We want you two to go and work together. You’re going to go into a breakout room because of the peer, the power of peer learning. and we just don’t use it enough.

Charles Booth (39:27.436)
Yeah, yeah, it probably means more as well because I suppose if you’ve got somebody else who’s working towards the same or similar goal through you as well, you kind of keep each other, you know, keep together. I mean, when I did my IQA qualification, me and a guy worked at Total People, we both did them together and it was almost if he got ahead of me, I was going to make sure I was going to be ahead of him. You know what mean? There’s an element of…

Mark Simpkins (39:51.178)
Yeah, that little competitive edge, yeah.

Charles Booth (39:53.42)
Yeah, it’s like, he’s done that bit. Right. What did you do for your bit? Going to do mine better. the fact that he’d done it, even if I didn’t do mine better, like the fact that you’re both going through it together, I think it’s definitely that’s underused. I think, yeah, I think of all the people I work with or could have done that with as well to do other things. And I never really bothered. That’s that’s probably massively overlooked as well. But yeah, that’s definitely useful. Yeah, we should have more examples.

Mark Simpkins (40:18.154)
Yeah, yeah, cool. I’m going to have to start bringing this to a bit of a close, mate. We’ve gone 40 minutes. I know we just keep rambling. Just to tie this up, you’ve got brand new business, and you’ve been asked, Charles, I need you to put together a staff development policy, whatever it may be. And you talked about culture earlier, which I absolutely agree with. If you were to go, right,

What are the things that I need to put together right at the start of this journey to make sure that staff development starts off on the right foot? What would it be?

Charles Booth (40:56.438)
Yeah, I think a mechanism for sharing what’s need the business has got or the direction that business is going in. want everybody in that business to know that there is room to development, whatever it is, but also to have some clues as to places they want to go. If somebody’s got a burning interest to do data technician stuff in their heart and they want to learn of data stuff because they’ve seen how much money you get on LinkedIn for it. And I’ve got a opportunity to do.

you know, some data stuff, I want them to know that they can go into that. And I also don’t mind the idea of them going somewhere else, learning from me and then going somewhere else. It’ll still benefit me and all that sort of stuff. But also if I’m quite happy to enable that, I’m sure they might even want to stay, who knows? So I think, yeah, the mechanism for presenting what the need is, what the opportunities are and the fact that we’re growing and we’re going in a particular direction. think that’s the first part. The second part is space for, you know, a real meaningful space outside of.

the working day for it to happen. Um, wherever that’s like one big event every quarter or every six months or something like that, or wherever it’s having, you know, like monthly, you know, it totally, we had like monthly team meetings and we had a big section and that team meeting that was space for it. And because it was outside of the normal job of traveling around doing whatever we’ve got to do. Um, I think that was possible. was a thing. So I think, yeah, the having that, yeah, presenting the opportunity, but then also making the space.

for I don’t think I need a round it off of a three. I think those two for me personally would kind of address 95 % of the needs because they are both both of those two are also the hardest two to do in reality. Yeah, setting time aside when you’re so busy and presenting the issue when you don’t want people to realize that things aren’t all together. know, it’s yeah, I think those two are probably the hardest and probably most valuable.

Mark Simpkins (42:35.543)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (42:46.859)
Yeah, I’ll add your last one then to it because what you’ve actually signified is old school, lost their intent and implementation is what you just talked about. And the last thing I put on there is obviously evaluation reflection, that self assessment process, and then being able to go, well, is this impactful? Is it, you know, can we see something tangible off the back of said CPD? And is it captured and can it be evidenced in the right way? You know,

Charles Booth (42:49.56)
Go free.

Charles Booth (43:14.892)
Yeah, there’s probably like a fractal like diagram there of like cycles going off and ever spiraling more little cycles of Making things nicer and nicer. Isn’t there I can yeah, I can see it. Yeah It’s almost like when they thought of the intent implementation and impact thing. It’s almost like they knew what they were talking about, isn’t it? Yeah Madness, but there we have it

Mark Simpkins (43:23.424)
Yeah.

Mark Simpkins (43:33.504)
That’s right, mate. Yeah, absolutely right. Absolutely right. Right. Well, look, I just want to I just want to say, mate, we’re coming up to 45 minutes. So thank you so much for your time today, Charles. It’s been it’s been great to kind of chin wag and stuff about this. is it is something that I’m passionate about is something that, you know, I think that some some clients have done exceptionally well and some, you know, some really do need to step up and think about this a little bit more. But hopefully, you know, the content of this podcast and some ideas is to

you know, how to move forward, how to structure something, how to make sure that it’s, you know, it’s getting the best out of their process. So thank you for your time today, mate. I really appreciate it.

Charles Booth (44:10.35)
Yeah, that’s been emotional. Cheers, eh?

Mark Simpkins (44:15.298)
So that’s a wrap today on this edition of Effie Gold. I hope you’ve gained some valuable tips and guidance and inspiration. As always, if you’ve enjoyed the show, please tell your connections, tell your friends and your colleagues, and that will help it grow. For personalized quality solutions or if you’ve got any specific topics you’d like to cover on one of my pods,

then get in touch with me, either direct message me on LinkedIn, or you can contact me at www.sympkinsfequalityconsulting.co.uk. This has been Effie Gold with me, host, Mark Simpkins and Charles Booth. Thanks for stopping by.