Learning and Development Specialist

Learning & Development Specialist

Swindon Head Office with remote working

£35,000 - £38,000 P.A plus Benefits

Smiths News is the UK’s largest news wholesaler. We’re unsung heroes at what we do; working around the clock delivering 23 million newspapers and 7 million magazines each week playing a critical role in one of the world’s fastest supply chains.

We now have an exciting new opportunity for Learning & Development Specialist to join our People team based in Swindon with remote working. You’ll be a part of our friendly and creative Talent and Communications function, as our learning specialist you will play a critical role in driving our ‘Development for All’ agenda.

About the role

We’d like you to come with a passion for learning and developing others. You will be responsible for the training needs analysis, design, delivery and evaluation of in house learning initiatives, supporting the business to create a culture of learning and high performance.

You will work with key stakeholders to understand capability gaps/learning needs in order to design, deliver and manage innovative, yet relevant, blended solutions to enable transfer of learning in the workplace including:

• Face to face delivery
• Online/eLearning
• Blended solutions
• Structured social (discussions, blogs etc.) or gamification approaches to reinforce and test learning)

You’ll play a key role in strategic projects where they impact our learning and development approach, processes and systems and proactively foster key relationships both internal and external to understand learning needs, performance and capability challenges with a solutions focused L&D approach.

You will be living and breathing our values ensuring these come to life through all you create and support.

About you

You will be an experienced learning and development professional and a confident communicator with the ability to build and sustain effective collaborative relationships, engaging and enrolling others at all levels. You will be a strong influencer, who can help educate and deliver the right solutions.

As a strong facilitator and coach, you will be skilled in delivering engaging learning interventions and you will be passionate about helping people to learn and grow. You will have the ability to think problems through creatively, balanced with a proactive approach to managing a busy workload and achieving results. You will be very organised and great at forward planning and detail.

You will have an understanding of the key principles of design and delivery of digital learning to support our people and provide a blended approach to learning. Experience of working with a Learning Management System (LMS) and some core ELearning design would be ideal.

You will know the latest learning practice, trends and emerging thinking and be keen to keep up with developments and act as a role model for learning.

What we can offer you

Smiths News is the UK’s largest news wholesaler. Our colleagues serve 24,000 retailers every day of the year, operating from 37 distribution centres. If you share our passion, spirit and can-do attitude, you really could go much further with us.

You will benefit from;

• Competitive salary
• Pension scheme with 5% company contribution
• Life assurance at x2 your annual salary
• 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays)
• Sharesave Scheme
• Cycle to work
• Tastecard enrolment
• Health cash plan
• Leisure discounts; Gym, holiday, Theme Parks
• Colleague Assistance Programme

We have a hybrid working model, balancing working from our Swindon office and working from home.