Summing up: How LinkedIn Learning helped the Law Society to embrace a shift in attitude towards self- development
SUCCESS STORY
Changing a deep-seated mindset through learning
The Law Society is the membership organisation for solicitors in England and Wales that drives excellence in the profession and safeguards the rule of law, lobbies government, and represent individuals and minority groups. The Law Society employs passionate people that monitor regulatory affairs, create policy, and uphold the law. Yet, this passion and determination of its employees to drive excellence for its members can result in a lack of investment in their own self-development. However, thanks to investing in key initiatives – including LinkedIn Learning - to help change mindsets, the tide is turning. The Law Society has seen an increased commitment from all employees choosing to invest in their personal and professional development.
THE CHALLENGE
Encouraging self-development towards creating a learning culture
In the last three years, the Law Society has made a concerted effort to update its technology, systems, and processes to increase efficiencies. Nick Featherstone, IT learning and adoption lead at the Law Society, explained: “I was brought in to support a big move away from old school, server-based computer storage to cloud-based computing and adopting the Microsoft ecosystem. I designed a strategy to support ongoing IT migration activities to increase people’s confidence and capable in using cloud-based systems to become more collaborative, sharing knowledge and learning to improve performance.”
Nick and his colleagues had numerous conversations about how change could be achieved, how best to manage that change and embed new ways of working and learning. The Law Society had trialled LinkedIn Learning on a small scale, with great success. Nick and Katharine Bollon, (Head of Capability and Talent at the Law Society), believed that there was an opportunity to align this Digital Workplace Programme with the Capability and Talent strategy. This would create an organisational learning culture that drives delivery of business objectives and performance improvement. The potential of LinkedIn Learning as a key enabler to both support employees to learn new technical and computing skills and to invest in their own self-development in a timely and meaningful way was strong.
THE SOLUTION
Making learning accessible and instilling a vision
Nick and Katharine built a strong business case that was agreed by the Leadership Team. Success of this business case would be making learning accessible to everyone; whenever and wherever they are, and to instil a vision – one where work is learning, and learning is work.
Nick and Katharine built a tool that assessed the digital learning needs of The Law Society’s employees. It plugged into the existing content that had been pulled together on LinkedIn Learning. Then they enlisted the help of ambassadors from across the business – called Digital Heroes, who were shown how to use LinkedIn and given content curation rights. The Digital Heroes worked with team members directly to help assess and identify skills gaps. As a result, skills courses and specific content were effectively matched, recommended and tailored to the needs identified.
Running in parallel with the ongoing Digital Workplace Programme, The Law Society delivered its annual Learning at Work Week. This encourages employees to embrace being an ‘everyday learner’. They had access to learning content matching The Law Society’s learning pathways within its LinkedIn Learning Hub. This content included both tailored learning developed by The Law Society as well as LinkedIn Learning’s content mapped to key capabilities, by pathway.
An award-winning programme with learning at its heart
Previously, The Law Society’s core learning channels included access to hybrid workshops, on demand learning materials on the intranet and “Lunch and Learn” activities. The adoption of LinkedIn Learning provided team members with more opportunities to learn at a time and place of their choosing and a greater richness of content, all mapped to The Law Society’s capabilities and learning pathways.
In fact, the implementation of LinkedIn Learning was instrumental in The Law Society being awarded a RITA (Real IT Award) for Project of the Year <£250k. The project focused specifically on technical migration to enable new ways of working, which The Law Society delivered jointly with CPS (Corporate Project Solutions), as part of the foundation phase of the Digital Workplace Programme. The project was the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of the tools being implemented with everyday learning put into practice, whilst working.
“LinkedIn Learning enabled us to provide on demand and flexible learning,” commented Nick. “We found that people would rather sit and learn in their own time rather than travel to London and sit in a classroom for five or six hours.”
Katharine agreed and said: “The Law Society is going to be 200 years old in 2025 and we have strong foundations and traditions we have built, learned from, and adapted over time. In the world of working and learning post-COVID, we need to keep doing that but with agility, pace and whilst continuing to put members at the heart of everything we do. Prioritising the strengthening and future proofing of our people’s capabilities is critical to this and we can only do that if we create an ‘everyday learner’ mindset.
She commented further: “The pandemic has changed how everyone thinks and how they approach working and learning. There’s a massive shift in people being more open to possibilities and to doing things differently. With the adoption of new digital tools and LinkedIn Learning, people can access and share knowledge and learning more effectively and in a more meaningful way, to help them to be their very best.”
Providing tools that encourage employees to invest in themselves
According to Katharine, employees at The Law Society are shifting towards a growth mindset that will help them to be everyday learners. They now have the tools to help them adapt and adopt their new ways of working.
Nick added: “We are moving away from the scenario where our employees are spoon-fed learning or where everyone gets the same content. When we introduced LinkedIn Learning alongside the Digital Workplace Programme, we changed the learning culture. People soon realised that we were not only going to give them information, but that we were also giving them practical tools and opportunities to develop themselves, pick up new skills, and make their working day more impactful.”
The results have been staggering. The Law Society has 400 LinkedIn Learning licenses and a 100 per cent activation rate. 85 per cent of the Digital Workplace programme training was delivered using LinkedIn Learning, with 1,100 hours of content consumed in a six-month period.
Nick added: “The adoption of LinkedIn Learning was key to the success of the Digital Workplace programme and our Learning at Work Week 2022 campaign. The flexibility of the tool allowed us to reach employees across England and Wales at a time to suit them and give everyone a shared learning experience like never before.”
Katharine agreed. “The successful adoption of LinkedIn Learning happened because we invested time in planning and aligning the rollout to business objectives and the benefits for individuals and teams. This was followed by strong execution and sharing success stories from teams to showcase the impacts on ways of working.”
She concluded: “As a result, we have seen a big shift in the appreciation and value of learning at the point of need. We pushed the benefits of LinkedIn Learning and now our people are more motivated to choose the learning they want, when it works best for them.”
Main product used:
THE RESULTS
Embracing learning
100% – number of seats activated
Creating a learning culture
24,778 video views in the last 12 months
A change in mindset
1,212 hours of learning in last 12 months
In their own words
“We have been able to live up to our motto of ‘everyday learning’ with ‘work being learning and learning being work’. The ability to learn on demand alongside hybrid learning events has tied everything together.”
“The pandemic has changed how everyone thinks and how they approach working and learning. There’s a massive shift in people being more open to possibilities and to doing things differently. With the adoption of new digital tools and LinkedIn Learning, people can access and share knowledge and learn more effectively and in a more meaningful way, to help them to be the best they can be.”
What the learners say
“The thing I love about learning with LinkedIn Learning is the really good energy that it brings.”
“I really love having the opportunity to indulge my curiosity and to find out something I didn’t know before.”
About The Law Society
The Law Society is the professional membership body representing solicitors in England and Wales. From negotiating with and lobbying the profession's regulators, government, and others, it offers training and advice and are there to help, protect and promote solicitors across England and Wales. The Law Society's regulatory powers are delegated to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). The SRA sets, monitors and enforces standards for solicitors across England and Wales. It acts solely in the public interest.
INDUSTRY:
Legal Services
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES:
400 - 450
HEADQUARTERS:
London, UK