Heathrow’s ambition was to give the best airport service in the world. That raised a bigger question than how to improve individual training programmes: what kind of learning system would help thousands of colleagues build the capability they needed now, while preparing for the skills and careers of the future?
At the time, responsibility, resources and budgets for training were distributed across many different functions. MJA worked with Heathrow to help frame a Training Transformation that could connect those separate activities into a more coherent organisational capability.
The scope was deliberately systemic. It included vision and strategy, governance, organisation design, career pathways, workforce and skills planning, curriculum, digital learning, a single integrated platform, specialist partners, communities of practice and interest, knowledge sharing, performance support and the overall colleague learning experience.
Rather than jumping straight to a new operating model, the work began with engagement and discovery: clarifying the case for change, understanding the existing system, interviewing a wide range of stakeholders, gathering data, looking outside Heathrow for fresh stimulus and identifying future-facing experiments that could test the emerging direction.
The roadmap then moved from discovery to prototypes, and from prototypes towards scale. The principle was to learn while building — introduce targeted changes, test them in practice, use evidence from pilots to refine the model and create a wider network of people able to carry the change.
That makes Heathrow an important example of a strand of our work that goes beyond programmes. Learning performance is shaped by the conditions around people: the systems, relationships, access, routines, technology, communities and opportunities that make learning easier or harder in the flow of work.
The design challenge, therefore, was not simply ‘what training should we provide?’ It was ‘what learning environment does Heathrow need in order to keep building the capability to perform and adapt?’