Life at VSO: Grace Taylor - Learning and Development Specialist

Here at VSO International, we have a team that operates across the world. As part of our Life at VSO LinkedIn article series, we aim to give you an insight into what life is like working at an international development organisation that works through volunteers to create a fair world for everyone. In this edition, we speak to Grace Taylor. Grace is a Learning and Development Specialist located in the UK.

What inspired you to work in the development sector?

I completed my undergraduate degree in human geography, which had a strong focus on Development Studies. I chose every module related to development as part of my degree, which allowed me to study the history and theory of development more broadly. It was ingrained with me and my siblings from a young age that we should try and work for an ethical organisation.

I knew I wanted to work somewhere that had a global remit and brought together different people from different places with different experiences and backgrounds that I'd be able to collaborate with and learn from.

When I was at university, I took part in the ICS youth volunteering scheme, and spent three months in Zimbabwe as part of a part of that programme and got a bit of exposure whilst I was there to how a development partner organisation operates. This only really reinforced my desire to work in the charity sector and specifically for a development organisation.

How long have you been with VSO??

I've been here just over five years. I started in September 2017. Feels like a very long time ago now. Basically, after I finished my degree, I moved to China to teach with the British Council and then on moving back to London, I started working at VSO so it was my first post university job.

What has been the biggest learning curve while working at VSO?

I think I'm still in my learning curve! I'm not sure I will ever escape it. That's probably partly because I'm a learning practitioner, but also the context in which we work - the development sector is so dynamic and ever changing and you must be willing and able to adapt to that if you want to work in this sector! I think perhaps that's one of the biggest challenges too that the landscape is ever changing. The current political and economic climate also poses new challenges all the time to the development sector specifically and to us as individuals personally, I suppose as well.

I can't not mention the pandemic. Managing a team of people through the pandemic was a steep learning curve and that balance of trying to look after your own wellbeing whilst also supporting team members at such an unprecedented time was a huge challenge, especially as I'd only stepped into a management role about two months before the pandemic began. Overall I still feel like I'm very much in the middle of that curve and hopefully decades away from reaching the end of my learning curve!

What's your role at VSO??

I'm one of the VSO learning managers. I'm the Learning Manager that focuses on supporting our global portfolio of programmes across our practice area networks. So basically, my role is to design and develop learning solutions, hopefully effective learning solutions for staff and volunteers across the VSO network. This could include developing and delivering capacity building or learning plans. It could be supporting with the facilitation of workshops or webinars. It could be advising on how to make meetings and events more engaging or building new online learning modules.

It can be quite wide ranging. And really, my priorities are ensuring that the learning solutions we have are inclusive, accessible, and useful for people. In an age of such information overload, I think it's increasingly important that we're intentional and focused on what it is that people need to learn and then what is the best way of facilitating that learning and so that's my sort of focus in priority generally across my role.

What it was like to have moved through three quite different departments at VSO?

I've worked in five roles in my five years, although I suppose different periods of time in each of those roles. I joined VSO as a supportive care coordinator. I sat within the supportive care team which was responsible for responding to all the general enquiries from members of the public; that could be people that donate financially, it could be people interested in volunteering overseas.

We also had the ICS programme still running at that time so we had lots of youth volunteer enquiries. I remember lots of fundraising processing, so processing monetary donations coming through the post, doing some of the online just-giving processing, I remember lots of spreadsheets and financial documents that we had to process.

About four months into my role in supportive care the team's remit was expanded to include community fundraising, so things like challenge events. If we had people that wanted to run the London marathon for us for example, then we had the responsibility of stewarding that relationship and supporting them with their fundraising.

My time in supporter care came to about nine months in total. The biggest learning that it gave me was a good understanding of the landscape of VSO as an organisation because we had to be able to triage and redirect all the different enquiries that that came into one central point. I got a solid understanding of how teams connected. I got to build relationships with a whole different range of people across the organisation as I would pass emails on to them, and acquire a good understanding of processes, especially how volunteering worked, what volunteering opportunities were available and what fundraising was happening in the organisation. It gave me a good platform and a good foundation of knowledge that I've drawn upon ever since in fact.

After the Supporter Care Team I moved into the Resourcing team, my first role in the Resourcing team was as the Induction, Sourcing and Events advisor. I had the responsibility of coordinating and delivering induction for international volunteers that we were sending overseas based across Europe and the Americas. At that time, we had three-day pre-departure face to face training, which I would support the delivery of whilst also developing new online content for induction.

The sourcing part of that role was to do with attending conferences and exhibiting at conferences to attract new talent into the organisation and to build brand awareness around VSO. It was all about trying to target and attract the skilled people that we needed for different types of roles. I was attending various events, like an early childhood education conference, or a conference for midwives or neonatal nurses to raise the profile of VSO and encourage some of those skilled people to apply for the roles that we had. We would also sometimes hold ‘Meet VSO’ events where we had the opportunity to engage with people external to VSO and help them understand a bit more about the organisation.

I got to learn all things induction, how to run the selection activities for new volunteers, how to work with different types of volunteers, how to engage people at conferences and support them to interact and understand VSO. I then moved internally within that team up to the team leader role.

I was the Resourcing Team Leader for about two years. In that role, I was managing the team of people whose responsibility it was to recruit volunteers and employees across Europe. It was the first time I've managed a team. The pandemic hit about two months after I started managing that team. The main learning was around how to manage a team through significant change, how to have difficult conversations, how to deliver bad news, how to work with immense uncertainty, but also how end to end recruitment worked and how to deliver a positive candidate journey, how to support and mentor team members to improve their own skills and capacity around recruitment.

How do you think this experience changed you and built your capacity as a leader?

I think it built my personal resilience. I think a challenging part of work, especially when we're working from home, is where personal and professional lives are overlapping in a way that they've never overlapped before. It's not appropriate anymore as a leader or line manager to ignore or separate the personal aspects of somebody's life whilst they're at work. As a leader or as a manager, you must take on all of that, and be able to support somebody and hold that space and that recognition, while also representing the interests of the organisation and ensuring that ultimately the work that needs to happen is possible and gets done.

It can be quite a difficult balance. I developed much better skills to strike a balance between supporting team members, representing their interests and wellbeing at the same time as representing an organisation and being accountable and responsible for what your team is supposed to deliver and how to manage those two things together. It also exposed me to working with a wider range of stakeholders across the organisation which allowed a great exposure to some of the strategic thinking and direction happening at VSO.

How have your previous roles helped you in your current one??

My current role as a Learning Manager I'm finding one of the most interesting roles that I've had because it brings together my interest in education and teaching from my previous experiences and draws upon all the knowledge that I built across VSO in being able to support others in their learning journeys.

It was a new role and even 10 months in, I still feel like I'm at the beginning of working out what the potential is, for this role what we could achieve and how I can be most useful. I think having the experience of delivering workshops and webinars and training to so many different people in different places has built my facilitation skills and experience in a way that means I'm now confident to continue that work delivering workshops and webinars with a whole different range of staff and stakeholders that I wouldn't have been confident to do a few years ago.

I've also learned more about how VSO operates as an organisation and what our culture is and how things ‘get done’ which means I'm better placed to navigate through all of that in a more efficient way and bring together the different people that need to collaborate to produce a new learning module or to consult on a workshop for example.

Why do you think functional learning development is critical for VSO?

I do believe VSO is a learning organisation. It's fundamental to what we do and if we even think about our People First Practice and Principles being people centred, being reflective then that’s core. If we think about the volunteering for development approach, and our work with primary actors to bring about lasting change, we can only really do that through a process of continuous learning and adapting. That means ensuring that we have the right capacity in the organisation and capability by developing and strengthening skills, working with employees and with volunteers to try and help them to reach their full potential. This is why learning is critical to VSO.

If we look at a lot of research that's been coming up more recently, organisations, where employees or volunteers, take time to learn, have better retention rates, a workforce that feels more engaged, more valued, happier at work!. So I think it's becoming increasingly important as well as the time goes on.

What new ways are VSO looking to deliver learning and development in the next five years?

We're always looking at innovative ways we can think about learning and development and the past two years with this massive shift to online remote working has really pushed forward learning and development and what that looks like.

We are looking at developing a VSO learning curriculum, having a more defined strategy around what our learning curriculum is and how all the different pieces fit together into one coherent curriculum instead of having standalone modules.

So building that wider learning infrastructure that new learning modules or learning solutions can fit within. We also want to support further creating more reflective spaces where ‘informal’ learning can take place. So thinking about learning as more than just training and intentionally having spaces to share learning. The communities of practice are a great example of this intention, where people from different project teams, different staff members are sharing learnings, they're sharing best practice, they're improving themselves as practitioners, but it's not a formal training opportunity. It's not a formal online course that's taking place but the learning that happens there is relevant and useful. We want to think about how we can foster more of these spaces for learning.

If we think about the online learning piece specifically, it's about improving our ability to build really engaging interactive online learning modules and video content that include interactive activities but that are also accessible for all. We want to expand our thinking around how an online learning module can fit into a wider learning pathway that might have other opportunities like supporting webinars, workshops or coaching to ensure learnings are applied in practice.

How do you think the perceptions of learning development as a function have evolved?

I think over the past few years the organisation has moved away from perceiving learning as just going on a training course to perceiving learning and development as including a combination of coaching, mentoring, on the job accompaniment, maybe supplemented with some formal training opportunities or webinars.

The shift to that blended learning approach, and it being an intentional blended learning approach, so that is how it is designed and conceived from the beginning -instead of it being a happy accident. We are also better at utilising our online learning platform Kaya now which is allowing us to maximise the effectiveness of the online learning opportunities that we do have and creating some sense of achievement as well.

Learners can earn Digital Badges when they complete certain modules which can be shared on Social Media platforms and are recognised across the sector. That's a new way we are celebrating people putting time and energy into learning and how are we recognising that achievement and that investment in professional development.

What does your average day look like?

I always start work around eight o'clock in the morning so I can maximise my working hours with all my colleagues based across the Africa and Asia region who are already a few hours ahead, and I always finish by about four o'clock in the afternoon. I could start the day facilitating a global induction webinar with new starters, new employees, and new volunteers. That could be followed by a preparation call for an upcoming community of practice, developing a session plan for how that session will run.

I could then spend the afternoon looking at learning methodology of a new online module that we're going to develop, updating modules in our learning platform Kaya or running reports to check on completion status and learner feedback. It's usually varied, and I will always try to get out at lunchtime, for a walk and to rest my eyes from the computer screen!?

How do you find working from home and how do you make it work for you??

For me working from home allowed me to regain two hours of commuting time everyday. That’s 10 hours a week that I can now put into exercising, into being creative, into volunteering, to seeing friends and family. I think that is one of one of the parts of working from home that I enjoy the most is that extra flexibility that it provides. As most of my colleagues are based overseas, if I was going into an office, I wouldn't see them anyway! So that helps a little bit.

However, without face to face contact it’s important to intentionally schedule time to build social relationships at work. That’s one thing I am very conscious of when you're working from home when you really aren't seeing people; taking the time intentionally to reach out and catch up with only the purpose of checking in with others socially. I find this really helps when it comes to you needing to collaborate with them on something work based. You have a foundation of a social relationship and trust and understanding that you can build from and it is possible to build that remotely!

I also do a ‘fake’ commute (if it's not raining!) That basically means in the morning and after work getting out the house and just going somewhere – to grab a coffee or quick walk in the park. Anything that creates that sense of distance between working and home life. I will always put away all my working things at the end of the day out of sight so that I'm not tempted in the evening to just log back on and have a look at emails or check my calendar for the next day. It’s taken a while to become disciplined about this but its helped.

What brings you joy outside of work??

Ah, I have quite a lot of hobbies! I think my biggest joy comes from singing in a choir. The weekly opportunity to get together with strangers for the shared purpose of the love of singing is wonderful. Of course I also get joy from spending time with friends and family especially my young niece and nephew.

I really enjoy my book club and having that intellectual stimulation with others that I miss now that I’m no longer at university! The exposure to different ideas and having opinions challenged. I also volunteer regularly outside of work and try to make the most of what London has to offer. I've lived here nearly 10 years in total and I still feel like I have endless theatres, museums and galleries to go to.

I will make a shameless plug - I joined the London charity softball league for the first time this summer. VSO has a team in collaboration with a few other organisations, and I had an absolute blast, but there's only two VSO members that are part of the team. We are encouraging more London based VSO staff to sign up next summer!

I should also mention travel, hiking, wild swimming, just being outdoors! Is there anything I don’t love?

What is one thing that you like the most about your role/work at VSO??

It’s the people - the dedication and the passion of colleagues and volunteers alike. I feel a sense of pride every day to be able to say that I work alongside such talented, dedicated individuals that I've been able to learn so much from that and now I'm in a role where I get to try and support the learning of some of those people and that is very fulfilling.