Michelle Whitely, Learning Centre Co-ordinator for the past 3 years at Home Retail Group in Widnes (now Sainsbury’s Argos) has been using the unionlearn mid-life review resources to support her amazing work at the Usdaw supported learning centre.

Michelle explains why there was a need for Supporting Mid-life Development reviews at her workplace:

We are a call centre and team leaders meet with the staff individually every week. They can have shop steward representation at the meeting and we noticed that older staff and team leaders were finding it more difficult to agree on things to say during the sessions."

The unionlearn resources have proved very useful at the learning centre:

There is nothing that we don’t use here! The cards are used to support coaching and mentoring and are a useful tool to break down age barriers among staff."

She also uses the cards to help people prepare their CVs and to conduct mock interviews and lots of people have secured internal promotion and some have got other jobs outside the organisation as a step up the ladder:

it’s given them a common language and script to use at interviews that has proved a success."

She jokingly refers to the cards as ‘Tarot for Business!’

Michelle works with partner providers to deliver apprenticeships and IT qualifications at the learning centre and the seven ULRs (soon to become 10) support the identification and delivery of other outcomes that have been requested as a result of the coaching and review sessions – namely touch-typing, their own version of ‘Silver Surfers’ and Dyslexia diagnostic testing. 

They also use on-line platforms to develop and deliver issue-based courses such as supporting mental health in the workplace which is becoming an increasingly important issue.

As a Learning Centre Co-ordinator Michelle can support up to 100 individuals at any one time and says that the business is pushing her to do even more:

The new management have been really surprised and impressed by what we do. We have regular communication between the union and management and they are now supporting me to set up a staff forum to consult with staff about what they need going forward."

Michelle appreciates that the challenges of work and using new technology does get harder as you get older and the forum will encourage staff to identify any specific training and support they may need, including any special adjustments in order to continue to do their job. 

As you get older you may need more time, we need to train team leaders to ensure they understand that this is not a negative, older workers can and do contribute so much experience and expertise to this business."

Michelle believes in this passionately and proudly stated that throughout the whole of 2017 the company is going to be concentrating on ‘Age across all our 3 different sites’ and so she will need even more resources to support her initiatives. 

We use the unionlearn signposting guides and we’ve even produced our own guide to the menopause which forms the basis of our training for managers. We love the Climbing Frame which I call ‘The Blockbuster’ and encourage all of our staff that use the learning centre to use it to track their learning and progression.

We even tell them to include skills developed outside of the workplace such as passing their driving test. This means that when managers ask for reports on individuals they can easily provide this information and show their contribution to the business."

For Michelle the Mid-life review aspect of her role is very important, as is the support that Usdaw and unionlearn provide.  

I run the learning centre like a business – I am very committed to the ‘Mid-Life Review’ process for all staff and feed all our achievements back to management. My union is fantastic, they provide people and networks that we can tap into to continue to improve ourwork."