Every new policy asks people to do something differently, but training is often treated as a mere afterthough, taking place after rollout. So what if we flipped the process? What if we treated learning as an essential, so policy actually changes what happens on the ground?
In this episode, we speak with Gavin Woods, Managing Director of Aurion Learning, who has spent almost 26 years helping government departments, agencies and public bodies turn policy into practice through digital learning.
What you can take from this episode:
🔹 Bring learning into the room where the policy is written: The organisations that win awards for delivery plan training alongside the policy, not after it. One recent client saw 98% of its audience complete the compliance training required.
🔹 Check your own language, and ask your audience what they need: Teams working intensely on policy can become "a little bit obsessed with our own plans and our own language", using terms their audience doesn't understand.
🔹 Look beyond the tip of the iceberg: The people already engaged with you aren't your whole audience. Where you can't simply tell people to complete training, work out what's in it for them, and design for learning rather than just information sharing.
🔹 Ask who is accountable for the policy's success, not just who runs training: Heads of strategy, transformation and sector skills increasingly need to be part of the conversation.
🔹 Build a one-stop shop for AI upskilling: A learning portal with approved tools, internal guidance and colleague case studies helps turn "is this here to take my job?" into confidence.
🔹 Don't mistake speed for quality: "Fast and bad is still bad." Ask what people need to know, what's difficult and what they ask most often, then pick the right format, from e-learning to a printable job aid.
🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.
#TransformGov #PublicSector #Learning #PolicyImplementation #AI
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