Building a five phase cross-functional, evidence-led learning strategy

The Challenge

The business is a European bandwidth infrastructure company connecting data centres, enterprises and cloud providers across 17 countries. As it grew, it invested in a range of learning activities – leadership sessions, sales training, a graduate scheme, and mental health and wellbeing initiatives – but these existed as standalone interventions rather than a coherent learning strategy anchored in business priorities.

• They had an active learning offer, but it was fragmented, course-led and not clearly aligned to the organisation’s evolving strategy.
• Employees reported feeling unclear about what development opportunities were available and what was expected of them in terms of owning their growth.
• Senior leaders wanted stronger engagement and retention of top talent, yet lacked a clear, evidence-based view of the skills and capability gaps across functions and levels.
• Learning investment was at risk of being driven by assumptions and ad hoc requests rather than by a structured diagnosis of needs and their connection to strategic goals

The Results

• A five-phase, cross-functional learning needs analysis created a clear, evidence-led view of behavioural and technical capability needs across the organisation.
• A structured skills framework and costed investment case gave leaders clarity on where to focus L&D spend across programmes, departmental budgets and scalable learning.

• A prioritised roadmap with RAG-rated recommendations clarified what to keep, what to evolve and what to build from scratch, turning insight into an actionable sequence.

• A prioritised roadmap and rebranded Love2Learn framework helped the organisation shift from a course-centric model to a resource-rich learning ecosystem that supports performance, talent retention and growth.