Nicola Tudor, head of marketing at Skills for Care, discusses its recent #KeepLearning campaign and the enthusiasm among the sector to continue to develop.

At Skills for Care our role is to support the social care sector, including through sharing information, resources and insights, to help people working in social care with key areas of their work. We run regular communications campaigns to help us do this – sharing resources, data, blogs, articles and interviews across our website, social media, newsletters and other communications channels.

To kick off 2023 we focused our first campaign of the year on learning and development for social care workers, with our #KeepLearning campaign running through January to March. We were delighted to see how much people working in social care have engaged with the campaign and were really pleased to hear feedback that people have found the campaign useful.
A large part of our #KeepLearning activity was focused on highlighting the important effect that providing learning and development has on lowering staff turnover rates.

Skills for Care data tells us average turnover rates decreased from 41.2% among staff who had no training to 31.7% among those that received some form of it. Turnover was reduced even further, by 9.1%, for care workers who received more than 30 instances of training when compared to care workers with just one instance of training.

We shared our data highlighting the positive impact that learning and development has on staff retention in what was one of our most-read blogs in March. So, it’s clear to see that social care managers are keen to evaluate and understand the impact that ongoing learning and development will have for their staff and organisation.

Throughout the campaign we’ve also noticed that our information around induction training has been popular. This is another key element in supporting staff retention through learning and development. Additionally, our articles about different learning opportunities and funding options available in 2023 – including learning for managers – have been some of the most read topics through the start of this year. So, it’s clear that managers have been eager to get the year started by planning in training for both themselves and their teams.

The campaign has also allowed us to gain insight into the learning habits of people working in social care. One poll we ran found 71% of respondents’ favourite way to learn was ‘on-the-job’. We can feed these insights into the wider social care sector and also consider these when planning the resources and support that we’re offering to the workforce. Our #KeepLearning campaign has been a really positive way to start the year. It’s truly reiterated how important ongoing learning and development is for the social care sector and how enthusiastic and engaged people working in social care are to keep on developing and building their skills and knowledge to continue to provide the best quality care, even in busy and challenging times.

All our #KeepLearning blogs, articles, information, resources and other support can be found on our website: skillsforcare.org.uk/KeepLearning