Hanover Scotland Case Study
The Challenge
It is a huge benefit to be able to offer refresher courses. It means our staff are always current and helps with their Continuing Professional Development.
Hanover Scotland is committed to providing its staff with the appropriate training required to support its customers. These members of staff are dispersed over a huge area – from Inverness in the north, right down to the Borders. In itself, this creates logistical and cost issues for traditional face to face learning delivery.
Adam Curry, Hanover Scotland’s Workforce Development Manager, explained:
” There are costs involved in providing cover for staff who are out on face to face training courses and it is important to minimise any operational disruption.”
About Hanover Scotland
Hanover Scotland provides affordable, modern, and safe housing and services across the country and is Scotland’s leading housing association for older people. It manages more than 5,000 homes on more than 200 housing developments, offering rented housing and acting as factoring agents to more than 2000 homeowners.
Apart from its customers, Hanover Scotland’s staff are its most important asset. More than 500 dedicated people are employed at its housing developments, area offices and in its head office. It is also Investors in People and Investors in Diversity accredited and committed to becoming an Employer of Choice.
The Solution
Hanover Scotland first started to use online learning courses from Virtual College in 2012. Their use of these resources has increased each year since then. In 2013 they chose a silver membership package of courses and in 2015 upgraded to gold membership. Within 6 months of their start, all Hanover Housing staff now undertake core online induction training, to cover knowledge of legal and regulatory requirements.
These courses include data protection, equality and diversity and customer care. They are taken by everyone including office based staff, support workers, cleaners, and catering staff. There were around 130 new starters last year so this alone represents a significant training requirement. Some staff also take functional-specific training, for example, ‘slips, trips and falls’ and housing specific courses, taking the number of learners to up to 200 in each year.
The Results
Adam commented: “Our staff find it convenient to learn online as they can undertake their training at a time and place which is convenient for them.
“It is a huge benefit to be able to offer refresher courses. It means our staff are always current and helps with their Continuing Professional Development.
“It’s really easy to use the system. Learners access the courses via Virtual College’s Learning Management System interface which is smooth, contemporary, clean and crisp.
“Learner reports can be pulled easily and quickly from the LMS for management and external review by care inspectors and auditors, for example, who expect a robust learner trail to be available for review.”
Adam continued: “For Hanover Scotland, it overcomes the cost and operational issues involved in face to face training.
“We need to keep learning current and this is a really cost effective way of ensuring this.
“We are starting to take e-learning to the next stage and beginning to create some of our own e-learning content via the Virtual College authoring tool – ‘Create’.
“This is a new trial for Hanover Scotland aimed at enabling us to deliver specific content to our staff so we will see how it develops over the next year.”
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