KPMG Learning Services

Workplace learning has changed rapidly in recent years. The way in which the pandemic changed the relationship dynamic between employer and employee; economic conditions obliging businesses to cut costs; and the emergence of yet more disruptive technology – all these factors have combined to create substantial challenges for anyone responsible for organisational learning and development (L&D).

On the one hand, these factors have led more and more senior leaders to question what their ideal learning function should look like and how it should operate.

On the other, they’ve also forced businesses to undertake major change projects of their own; projects which often come with substantial learning requirements attached.

Our Learning Services offer is designed to support organisations wherever they are on that transformational journey.

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Ever since the formation of our Learning Services business, much of our learning consultancy work has been connected to major change projects being undertaken by our clients.

Regardless of whether it’s about refocusing an organisation’s main business priorities, optimising its cost base or improving its resilience, such projects typically have a workforce transformation component to them – because they leave an organisation requiring something new from its workforce.

Whatever their motivation might be, our Learning Services offer is designed to provide organisations with the advice and support they require. For example:

• they may have identified a particular skills gap that they need our help to address;
• they may need support in designing or finessing their learning strategy.
• they may want to benchmark their learning capabilities against their peers or to improve their evaluation programme; or
• they may require something more hands-on that manages all the practical elements of physically delivering their learning programme.

With our extensive in-house faculty and operations team, a substantial supplier consortium and a Microsoft-partnered technology offering, we’re ideally placed to assist, whatever their motivation might be.

Today, we also work extensively with clients looking to transform and modernise their own central learning function, rethinking how it supports the wider business. Typically, this means they’re looking for three things; strategic alignment, operational excellence and value creation.

The focus on strategic alignment is a tacit acknowledgement that, for too long, learning functions haven’t been aligned to what their business wants to achieve. Too much content has been created and distributed with insufficient thought given to the skills and behaviours the business actually needs.

The desire for operational excellence stems from wanting a consumer grade, frictionless, digital learner experience, driven by efficient processes, insightful analytics and a capable learning team.

Value creation follows when all of this allows traditional learning models to be challenged, delivering measurable business impact and tangible value, especially at a time when learning budgets are under increasing downward pressure.

This all begins with a piece of work designed to align business and learning strategy, exploring how the business is changing and how learning needs to reflect this. This then leads into discussions around supplier management, learning administration, process re-engineering, governance, automation and how best to embrace disruptive technology – and many more considerations besides.

Our greatest strengths in this area lie in transformational consultancy and supplier management. On the former, we have the organisational design skills to help create the learning function a business wants. On the latter, our existing consortium of learning providers provides a ready-made and cost-effective way of sourcing all the skills development expertise any business could ever need.

As a major professional services firm, we’ve worked with the biggest organisations all around the world for decades now. We know how they operate and what makes them tick.

Along the way we’ve built relationships with their senior leaders, knowing what motivates and concerns them.

Our name is synonymous with quality and rigour, thanks to over 150 years of delivering audit, tax and advisory services. We understand strategy, project delivery, risk, evaluation and the importance of delivering a return on investment.

Assurance and a commitment to continuous improvement are in our DNA. We’re curious, open-minded and keen to collaborate with like-minded experts.

These are the fundamental components of a successful professional services business; fundamentals that we now apply within the workplace learning market.

Today, we’re one of the largest learning consultancies in Europe, working across all industry sectors and helping UK Plc with its productivity and employee engagement and retention. With over 600 learning clients, we currently support over 600,000 individual learners in the UK.

What we started building in 2012 is now an impressive in-house faculty of over 350 dedicated, experienced and highly credible Learning Services staff. That faculty comprises everything from learning content designers and project managers through to learning technologists, quality assurance and evaluation specialists and a full customer service support team.

Most of our staff work across three teams:

• Learning Content – responsible for producing high quality, engaging learning content that supports our clients’ transformational change work and improves learners’ productivity;
• Learning Delivery and Operations – customer service specialists, responsible for administering every aspect of the learning experience; and
• Learning Technology – in charge of LEAP, our learning technology platform, and tasked with incorporating all the benefits of our global alliance with Microsoft into our learning activities.

The specialist L&D expertise that we have assembled in-house is complemented by a sizable L&D consortium, stocked with everything from boutique training providers to some of the world’s most reputable business schools, academic institutions and accrediting bodies. We’ve carefully selected every one of these, firm in our view that we all have to share the same values, beliefs and ways of working.

What this capability allows us to do is to design and deliver entire curriculums; to create learning pathways; and to make available a vast wealth of learning activities, both off the shelf and bespoke.

As well as always being on the lookout for new and innovative tools and providers, we continue to add new specialisms to the in-house team, incorporating the latest services that we offer to clients from elsewhere in KPMG. Industry skills benchmarking, data analysis and customer experience mapping are just some of the disciplines to have been added to our learning offer in recent times, helping clients make even better decisions about their curriculum and how it’s managed.

The organisational insights and L&D experience that we now bring allow us to elevate learning from something plain or generic to something that can make a genuine difference on the ground, delivering relevant content, when and where it’s most needed, and a positive learning experience.

What unites all our staff and suppliers is our belief that learning must make a difference – and that we can make learning better.

At an individual level, workplace learning should help you be even more productive in your current job – or help you secure a better job. At an organisational level, learning needs to deliver real, tangible results; something that justifies the investment.

When designing and delivering learning, we believe that its success will often come down to whether you can make people care about it. As a learner, if you understand the impact that a piece of learning could have, the difference it could make or how it ties into a bigger organisational purpose, then you’re more likely to care about what you’re learning.

And if you care about it, then you’re going to engage with that learning activity in a very different, more invested, way than with something that feels more like an obligatory tick-box exercise.

That’s why learning needs to be meaningful and relevant; tailored to an individual’s job and to an organisation’s particular circumstances. Done correctly, the impact of what we help deliver can be seen filtering right down to an organisation’s customers or end-users.

We don’t just think we can make learning better. We know we can. By making learning relevant, engaging and linked to an overarching purpose, we’ve proved time and time again how we can help organisations to improve their performance and productivity. The best thing is, we’re still learning too, so – together – we’re only going to keep getting better at this.