Five years ago, Peter Butler joined BT as head of learning and in a short space of time has clearly made his mark on the L&D function. As he explains: “When I joined, there was very little governance in the learning and development space so I created a learning council that sits across the organisation and oversees learning across the company, determining its strategic direction, budget and so forth.

“Five years ago, there were a dozen or more learning management systems in operation. Following the BT mantra of ‘we do it once and we do it really well’, I rationalised the multiple learning systems and created one LMS called Route to Learn, which now provides a route to learning for all the company’s 147,000 employees.”

Butler’s final piece of reorganisation was his reduction in the number of preferred suppliers, from 1,142 when he joined to just nine today. BT has its own training centre at Yarnfield Park, in Staffordshire, where a lot of its technical and apprenticeship training takes place. “We’ve tried to have all the delivery of learning delivered by organisations outside the company so we use preferred suppliers where we can for this,” explains Butler. “The planning and strategy remains inside the business, undertaken by people who have the knowledge of the requirements of the business both in terms of tactical (day-today) and strategic (long-term) delivery.”

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