Babington launches new strategy to develop better futures

@_Babington launches new brand identity with promise to develop better futures

Babington has launched its new brand and website, reflecting its commitment to helping organisations across the UK to address skills challenges and to drive business performance through talent.

Babington is setting out to ‘develop better futures’ for its business customers, learners, and the communities in which it operates. That means helping organisations to find solutions to their skills challenges and simplifying the funded learning routes that are available to them. At an individual level, it means supporting learners on its programmes to reach their full potential, whatever level they’re at, and enabling Babington’s own employees to develop and build successful and rewarding careers. And at a societal level, it means supporting communities and taking positive sustainable decisions, and helping drive social mobility and inclusion through  

David Marsh, CEO at Babington, commented:

“The new brand reflects how our proposition has evolved and our business has matured over the last couple of years. We’ve significantly diversified how we support our customers – helping Chief People Officers to really understand their skills challenges and working with them to develop a unified talent strategy, fully utilising all of the routes that are available to them. The breadth of our offering – from apprenticeships and funded learning through to commercial learning – means that we can think holistically about skills challenges and partner with customers to develop solutions which will deliver the upskilling and reskilling they need across their workforce.”

Babington has delivered significant growth over the past three years, securing major contracts to support the likes of Royal Mail, Amazon, and the Cabinet Office in their efforts to upskill, reskill, and build the talent pipelines of the future. The new brand signals an acceleration in this shift to becoming a more strategic partner to employers and increasing diversification in the solutions and approaches to delivery the company offers.

Rachel Kay, Chief Learning Officer at Babington, commented:

“This gives us a brilliant platform to refresh and update our clients around all of the different work we’re now doing, and to educate the wider market around the impact that we’re delivering to employers. Of course, apprenticeships are still a fundamental part of our business but we’re now supporting customers in a far broader and deeper way. We’re helping them to join up all of the different elements of their talent and skills landscape and cutting through the complexity surrounding funded learning so that they can simplify their decision-making.”

The new Babington brand is built around three core pillars – Potential, Performance and Personalisation. 

Potential refers to Babington’s commitment to unlocking people’s potential through lifelong learning journeys. In particular, Babington is striving to provide more opportunities for young people aged 16-24 to take their first step onto the career ladder through an apprenticeship, or other funded route. In doing so, Babington will provide customers with access to what is still a largely untapped resource of fresh, diverse, and high-potential talent.

Babington is also setting out to deliver personalised and contextualised learning experiences for each and every learner based on their own individual needs and preferences. The company is helping employers to move away from traditional linear learning approaches, where big cohorts of people are expected to go through rigid learning programmes at the same speed and pace. Instead, Babington is providing learners with the choice and control to learn in the way that best suits them, whether that is in a classroom, online or a blend of the two. Alongside this, Babington is also enabling employers to use technology and data to analyse learner behaviour, learner consumption and deliver tailored opportunities for further learning. This increases engagement with learning and helps to create a culture of curiosity and learnability across the workforce.

The new brand is also highly focused on linking learning to business KPIs, helping employers to drive performance through talent identification, attraction, and upskilling.

David Marsh concluded

“It’s encouraging to see that employers are starting to take a more holistic approach to tackling their skills challenges. We’ve been talking for a long time about the need to break down siloes between L&D and apprenticeship teams so that employers can develop a unified talent strategy. Our job is to help our customers to understand their skills needs and consider all of the options that are available to them in response, simplifying funding routes so that they can make informed, strategic decisions.”