An In Good Company podcast with Jackie Barefield, Head of Capability Development at BAT
What makes award winning learning programmes?
(from someone who’s read hundreds of entries)
What does award‑winning learning really tell us? Beyond trophies and categories, years of judging submissions offers a rare vantage point on how organisations are changing - how they lead, how they learn, and what they prioritise when performance truly matters.
Latest listen
After a decade on the judging panel for the Learning Awards, Jackie Barefield has read hundreds of award submissions. It means she can spot the patterns and identify the trends. She joins Dan to discuss not just what wins and why – but how learning has evolved. What separates the good from the forgettable. And where even experienced teams still get it wrong.
Jackie and Dan's conversation might be focused on awards, but what emerges is that if you strip it right back and thought about these four things before you start any learning programme, you are surely onto a winner.
Watch the full episode here:
1. Start with the business problem (not the learning)
The strongest entries don’t start with content. They start with a need.
"Awards asked people to look at the impact measures, and that has grown and grown so that we now see more people building that into their process from the beginning, making sure that they're aligned with the business problem before they begin design development and delivery."
Takeaway
It sounds obvious, but not all programmes can demonstrate this. If the business problem isn’t clear, no matter how good your solution is - it will always feel detached from what your organisation needs you to achieve.
2. Prove it made a difference
This is where the biggest shift has happened.
“10 years ago, engagement, adoption or consumption was the key success metric, which doesn’t really tell us about the impact of the learning - at best, it tells about the impact on the learner, but not on the business. Entries now bring the evidence to support the fact that this actually made a difference to the business. You can’t just say it made a difference, you’ve got to back it up with something and if you haven’t got a baseline that final measurement means very little at all.”
Takeaway
What judges are looking for now is proof. This is much harder to measure, but that makes it much more meaningful.
3. Show the full story (not just the solution)
Winning entries don’t showcase a moment. They show thinking.
“What good looks like now is the full end to end story. We captured what was needed in the business. We explored that and made sure that it was actually the problem that needed to be solved, and that learning could solve that problem. We designed to those objectives, and then we delivered to those objectives, and we measured and we provided evidence. So it's an end to end story rather than just saying 'look at these fancy widgets that we created'."
Takeaway
Judges are looking for the red thread. Don't jump straight to the output without showing how it connects.
4. Don’t confuse ‘wow’ with value
Standout does not mean flashy.
“The focus used to be on bright and shiny… did it have the wow factor? But that's the icing on the cake rather than the actual driving force for the learning. The process itself is arguably more valuable than the award that you get at the end of it, because it really, really shows you where where you where you've missed something or where you could have done something better."
Takeaway
Remember - you’re not being awarded for the way you’ve written your submission, you’re being awarded the work that you did.
The future of learning
Award-winning learning hasn’t become more complicated. More learning now takes place while you work and evaluation has to be more disciplined. If you’re looking to have the best results focus on clarity:
- A clear problem.
- A clear link to the business.
- And clear evidence it worked.
Everything else is just dressing.
Listen to the episode on Spotify
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