Learning at Work Week: What Is It For and Why Engagement Is Sometimes the Measure That Matters Most
Nvolve joined pladis UK across seven production sites for Learning at Work Week 2026. What the week surfaced was a question worth asking in every operational organisation: what does engagement with training actually mean, and how do you know when you have it?
What Learning at Work Week is actually for
Learning at Work Week has been running annually since 1999, coordinated by the Campaign for Learning. The national theme for 2026, Many Ways to Learn, is a deliberate invitation to look beyond structured programmes and consider the full range of ways capability is genuinely built in working environments through practice, peer conversation, on-the-job experience, and tools accessible at the point of work rather than separated from it.
The week creates permission: to talk openly about development, to invest time in it publicly, to recognise the people who take it seriously. For an office-based employer, engagement with learning looks broadly like what the word suggests: people participating willingly, connecting development to career progression, feeling that the organisation invests in them. Those are legitimate and important outcomes, and the participation metrics that week-long campaigns generate are a reasonable proxy for them.
For an organisation operating production sites in a regulated industry, the definition starts to shift.
A more useful definition of engagement
The case for workplace learning in food manufacturing, logistics and packaging does not rest primarily on motivation or satisfaction scores. It rests on the ability to demonstrate, at the moment it is required, that the right training was delivered, understood and applied by the right people. That moment arrives as an audit, an HSE inspection, or an incident investigation, and it is not scheduled in advance.
UK research from Flip found that 52% of manufacturing workers report disengagement - the highest proportion of any sector surveyed, including retail, logistics, hospitality and construction. The consequences in a regulated production environment are highly specific: operators uncertain about SOP requirements, training completed on paper but not evidenced, competence that cannot be demonstrated under pressure. 70% of employee skills are built through on-the-job experience, which means learning that genuinely sticks is learning connected to the tasks people actually perform, in the environment where those tasks happen.
BRCGS auditors identify approximately 185,000 non-conformities annually across certified sites worldwide. The skills matrix is key among the documents specifically requested at audit: showing evidence that personnel have received the training required for their roles, that competence has been assessed, and that records are current and retrievable. A matrix that cannot be surfaced quickly, or that reflects training completed on paper but not evidenced digitally, is a documentation failure regardless of whether the training itself was effective. Attendance is not training, training is not competence and tools like the skills matrix will effectively surface the differences here.
HSE enforcement data carries the same pattern. In one instance within the last 2 years, a food manufacturer was fined almost £600,000 following serious injuries across two of its production sites. The investigation found training was inadequate and monitoring insufficient. The finding was not that training had not happened, but that what had happened could not be demonstrated to have been effective or properly tracked. The distinction recurs consistently across food manufacturing enforcement cases.
Engagement with training, in this context, can mean something very precise. It means that a site manager asked to produce records for a group of people, under audit pressure, can do so quickly, accurately and completely. It means that when an SOP is updated, the right people have seen it, understood it and signed it off. It means the evidence chain is intact before anyone asks for it, because the consequences of its absence are financial, reputational and, in the most serious cases, irreversible.
Learning at Work Week is worth celebrating. It is also worth using as an annual prompt to ask a harder question: is engagement with training in this organisation meaningful in the sense that will make a material difference to production, safety and skills development and could this be demonstrated easily on request at any time?
What the wider conversation is surfacing
The sharpest distinction to emerge from the week's wider conversation is one that every organisation running training programmes should sit with: providing learning opportunities and genuinely embedding learning as a driver of performance and culture are not the same thing. The clearest framing is this: learning is not an event, but rather an environment. The practical question for any organisation investing in training is whether what is being built shapes how people work every other week of the year, or only this one.
Several contributions to the week's conversation reinforced the same challenge: move beyond activity towards outcomes, and hold the organisation accountable for the difference learning actually makes. In regulated operational environments that distinction is visible and measurable, that is the difference between training records that exist and training records that can be surfaced, verified and relied upon at the moment they are needed.
In the food and agriculture sector, one major UK employer used the week to set out the breadth of their development investment: over 250 apprentices currently in programme, more than 140 colleagues who have completed internal leadership pathways, and a newly launched sector-specific academy building industry skills for the future. Their closing note on LinkedIn posts thanked colleagues who have demonstrated ownership for their learning and development. This clearly captures what every operational L&D team will recognise as the harder half of the job. Completion may be measurable but Ownership in personal learning and development is what the in-place skills development culture either produces or does not.
What we heard on the floor
During Learning at Work Week 2026, the Nvolve team visited seven manufacturing sites across the pladis UK network: Aintree, Manchester, Halifax, Carlisle, Wigston, MDC and Harlesden — sites producing well known household favourites like McVitie's, Jacob's, Jaffa Cakes, Hobnobs and Chocolate Digestives at a scale where the margin for undetected capability gaps is by no accident, genuinely low. The Learning at Work Week Sessions were open to colleagues across training, safety, operations and leadership, designed around shared conversation rather than presentations from one department to many.
At Manchester, John Kalombo has become one of the Nvolve platform's active internal advocates. With a high degree of passion, he encourages fellow pladis colleagues to download the Nvolve app and access their own training profiles directly. What became apparent is that this is not because he has been asked to, but because he values what access to Nvolve offers them. Peer advocacy of that nature, in a production environment has its roots in deep experience of learning strategies and tools that colleagues find genuinely useful, relevant to their work, and therefore worth sharing.
At Carlisle, the conversations centred on exactly the audit-readiness outcome the earlier analysis points toward.
It's easy to download reports and it takes the stress away — it makes our life so much easier, especially when being asked for multiple reports for groups of people. It creates shared responsibility across the business.
The phrase 'takes the stress away' is worth noting. Audit readiness, where records are fragmented or difficult to surface, is a source of real operational anxiety. The shift to reports accessible on demand is a change in their experience of compliance, as well as the quality of the evidence. When clients describe this positive shift it in those terms in an animated and empassioned way, the change is undeniably embedded.
At the MDC site in Ashby, a Bank Holiday surge in orders meant the shop floor team were fully occupied in operations, which came as no surprise to the visiting team. The feedback from the training team there arrived regardless from the brief but meaningful conversations that took place.
Nvolve is a game changer for them and they absolutely love it.
Sasha Cawthorne from the Nvolve team who visited some of the pladis sites in the first half of the week, described the experience of meeting the various teams during Learning at Work Week:
"I'm so proud of how they talk about Nvolve, amalgamating the platform capabilities and the team behind them. They praise us as a cohesive team, including the product and all the enhancements we have developed for them, describing the Nvolve team partnership as second to none. As an Account Manager, that's all I could ever wish for."
What learning at work means beyond the week
The organisations that use Learning at Work Week most effectively tend to be those where meaningful engagement with learning is already the standard. The week becomes an opportunity to reflect on something that is already clearly happening and to celebrate it, rather than a prompt to start a conversation that has not yet begun and ,much more than an ambiguous social media calendar event.
The pladis sites the Nvolve team visited last week are in that position. The platform is in use, the evidence is accessible, and the people using it are willing to confirm this in no uncertain terms and in their own words. That is what engagement looks like when it is working in the way that matters most in a regulated operational environment: calm, evidenced, and already in place before anyone needs to ask for it.
If you would welcome a conversation about how Nvolve could support your learning at work deliverables and objectives, we’d be happy to setup an exploratory call with our team and if desirable, a meeting with one of our embedded clients.