Lifelong learning award for union rep

I think John's very deserving of being the recipient of this award, because for so many years he's dedicated himself and committed himself to being a very strong union activist within the workplace, and has a very keen sense of learning and providing others with opportunities and developments.

We use a number of different ways to get out and speak to workers throughout the workplace.

We have desk-based people, engineers in the field. We use social media, email, text messages, WhatsApp groups, word of mouth, and sometimes small events in key locations, where it just generates that conversation and then comes one-to-one contact to say I'd like to do this.

It could be a structured course, or you know, you then suddenly find there's a pocket of people that are interested in the subject.

As we send out emails, one of the things that we commonly do is the regular intake for The Open University's microcredentials, and it generates quite a lot of interest.

There's many different subjects that you can do over a 3-month period, to rapidly gain some some skills, and we're finding over the years it's becoming more and more popular.

We build then little groups where people can then support each other through that structure, and we've been finding it's a key way of you start and learn a subject and then you can use The Open University to develop further and wider.

So I've done one myself. I've done the cyber security, and it was short, it was intense, but I got everything I needed to progress then on to get my certification that was going to be industry recognised.

Union Learning is very important, because get funding to our Union to get courses run, because a lot of members wouldn't be going courses otherwise.

It’s building that close-nit community where we would buddy people up in courses, and get the feedback from previous courses, and then go back and have a look at it and say, what is working, what's not?

So, during COVID we moved everything online.We lost our buddy system with people in the classroom, so we built WhatsApp groups.

And the amount of activity that's in there, you know, I'm stuck can anyone help me with that, here's a phone number, can someone check this, and it was just that community-led.

That workplace development is that they all got together and said I'm going to help each other out.

I think John deserves the award because he's basically been an inspirational for union learning representatives, and built confidence for learners to go into courses that they wouldn’t otherwise do.

A lot of things are changing, we're seeing jobs being offshore we're seeing complex roles change, AI is coming forward.

There's transformation, there's different efficiencies, so Union Workforce Development is important, especially in the Telecom sector.

I think we've seen people flourish in a way that they don't in the workplace, because they have the confidence and the encouragement from someone like John in that role, to believe in themselves that they could be more than just doing their day-to-day role.