Building on their Diversity & Inclusion work with universities such as St Andrews and East Anglia, the workshop was designed to bring Learning & Development Managers from across the UK, so they can exchange ideas on the latest training and development needs in their organisations, share best practice and participate in knowledge exchange, and learn from the experts at Marshall E-Learning on upcoming trends and changes in the law that may affect their work.

Marshall also launched their new video e-learning suite and gave clients an update on the latest best practice on the Prevent Duty, as advised by their consultants Michael Howard and law firm Shakespeare Martineau.

Dan Robertson, Diversity & Inclusion Director at the Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion (enei), gave a presentation on the latest research they had developed on Inclusive Leadership. The research showed that Inclusive Leaders have 15 core competencies, which are not seen together in the existing Inclusive Leadership models.

Following the presentation, there was an informal discussion with the whole group, with the findings to be written up and shared with Marshall E-Learning clients afterwards.

The universities participating in the workshop included representatives from: Durham, Harper Adams, Cranfield Roehampton, University of East London, St George’s University, Gloucestershire College, Bournemouth and Brunel. Universities UK, the representative organisation for the UK’??s universities, were also represented on the day.

David Marshall, Managing Director of Marshall E-Learning Consultancy, explained why they ran the user group:

“One thing I’??ve always made sure we keep central to everything we do at Marshall E-Learning is to be responsive to the needs of our clients. They are the ones working at the front line of their sector, so they need access to the latest thinking?? whether that’??s in higher education, law, finance or healthcare. That’??s why we always update our training in line with the latest legislation changes or any other sector changes that mean our courses need to keep up with that change as well.”

“One of the other ways we learn what our client’??s need is by running regular user groups, to get our clients together and spend an afternoon discussing their needs and what they see as their training and development priorities for the year ahead. These groups give an informal setting to meet other Marshall clients, see our latest work and see upcoming changes may affect how they think about their own training and development programmes.”

‘The role of the diversity lead is sometimes a lone one and all clients enjoyed cross networking across sectors. Our partners at enei and our clients reported that they found discussing the latest research with a wide range of universities as very stimulating.’

The full outcomes of the workshop will be written up and shared on the Marshall E-Learning website.

For more information and details of upcoming workshops from Marshall E-Learning, please contact David Marshall at dmarshall@marshallacm.co.uk or on +44 (0)845 123 3909.