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“Leaders today crave immersive experiences that equip them with the practical skills to navigate the complexities of their role,” is something I often hear from Learning and Development leaders.

Improving productivity growth is the decades old dilemma for UK business. Throughout my whole career, which I’ll be honest dates back to typewriters on desks, it seems that we’ve been trying to crack the code on how to increase work outputs.

Reasons for absenteeism can range from mental health concerns to workplace stress and dissatisfaction. When Illness forces employees to take time off, disrupting workflows, and impacting productivity, these can be costly problems for businesses.

After a period of testing and development, Pilotlight Impact Day was born. Rather than focus on open questions of strategy, funding and governance for charities, the time was structured into small teams focusing on precise challenges, carefully prepared in advance, that were critical to the life of the charity.

Workplace volunteering has the potential to boost productivity, improve employees’ wellbeing, and generate billions for the UK economy, according to a new report by Pro Bono Economics (PBE).

With World Happiness Day, it's a good time to look at what businesses are doing to pick up the cause of employee wellbeing and there are some surprising results.

Over my year at Pilotlight, there is perhaps one phrase I’ve heard more than any other from our volunteers: “I’m not sure there is anything I can bring to this charity.”

As learning and development professionals, your role extends beyond developing technical expertise and other 'hard' skills to cultivating a workforce that is emotionally intelligent, collaborative and excels at communication. 

Helping charities as a volunteer is a great way for people to give to the community. This is particularly the case for skilled volunteering – where you are using your workplace or professional skills to make a difference. Seven out of ten charities are looking for support in the form of professional skills, but only four out of ten find it. Charities need skilled support.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, having a skilled workforce isn’t enough to guarantee success. Companies invest heavily in training and development programmes to enhance the technical skills, but these hard skills alone are not enough to guarantee success.

As a social enterprise focused on supporting charities, Pilotlight is sometimes perceived as an outlier in the corporate learning and development sector. This year we’ve challenged ourselves to better understand the impact of our programmes on employees and the return on investment for their employers.

Little did I know that a seemingly simple email was about to change my perspective in a big way. It was from Pilotlight. Thanking their ‘Pilotlighters’, both past and present, for their contribution to the skills-based volunteering programmes they run in partnership with Barclays. And whilst reading it, the thought struck me that I actually had a lot to thank Pilotlight for.