At Warrington Housing Association we take lifelong learning very seriously.
We support our colleagues in their continual professional development as we recognise it benefits themselves personally, WHA and the service we provide to our customers.
As we mark Learning at Work Week, our customer voice officer Bernie Hubble, who shares a commitment to discovering new ways to upskill with WHA customer experience manager Sarah Whyment, explains how Tpas has contributed to WHA’s learning at work programme.
Bernie said: “Tpas is not-for-profit organisation that promotes, supports, and champions tenant involvement and empowerment in social housing. “It offers training, support, advice and a wide range of other services to landlords, tenants, and contractors.
“As members we get invaluable access to in-person courses and free webinars. We make sure it is not just our scrutiny panel of tenants that gets made aware of the opportunities but also our other colleagues in other departments.
“Everyone from the maintenance teams to the money advice officer has an element of customer service to their roles and so benefit from training in that area too.
“The areas in which we have been widening our knowledge are not just the statutorily required matters but engagement, customer satisfaction, housing law, tech and software advances and many others.”
Bernie added: “An unexpected side effect of the pandemic was with rapid increase in training available online.
“It has hugely improved our ability to access this knowledge and fits in with the agile nature of working at WHA. It is much more convenient to take an hour or two here and there, rather than planning a whole day out of office.
“Recently and somewhat topically given the current cost-of-living crisis, the WHA customer service attended the Tpas one-hour webinar covering the issue of furniture poverty, which proved highly revealing and useful. This sort of short chunks of training are easy to fit in during the day meaning we are more likely to take advantage of it.”
