They say ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ and for the training team at HOST that has certainly been the case.

Like most businesses, with the onset of Covid 19, HOST has had to adapt its Learning and Development quickly.



HOST support the HPC project and are therefore keyworkers, so most of the team have remained working within the campuses. However, those that can, have been working from home so we have had to find a blend of learning and development opportunities.

Remote learning has been utilised, offering daily training sessions via Microsoft Teams, these have been well attended and surprisingly easy to facilitate. Our Housekeeping department have been creating training videos, which we can host on our team Facebook page, so that more recently employed members of the team can access bite-size training sessions as they need to.

There has also been a lot of great external sources of L&D that has been provided by various outlets such as Linkedin Learning and local colleges, which has been a great help, and added to the HOST offering.

HOST’s 35 Apprentices have also had to adapt their learning. The local training providers such as Bridgwater & Taunton College and First Intuition in Bristol have been extremely proactive in ensuring that visits that would usually take place onsite, have taken place remotely, so that there is continuity with contact and assessments.

The overall experience has been a steep learning curve for our training department and learners but new skills have been learnt, and moving forwards we believe the training offering will be much more engaging and exciting.