I love to keep one foot in employment so that I have a real and lived understanding of the challenges faced by your best female talent.

Back in March, I started a part-time fixed term contract at Macmillan Cancer Support. I joined the Volunteering L&D team to work on a project to design and develop digital induction training for their amazing volunteers.

Less than two weeks later the whole nation went into lockdown and Macmillan was faced with the challenge of converting their face to face emotional support volunteering to a remote offer, almost overnight.

I worked with the very lovely Kathryn Palmer-Skillings and colleagues across the charity to create new learning content, repurpose training materials and create a new digital learning programme for Macmillan’s Telephone Buddy Scheme that was ready to be used within a week.

It wasn’t the project I expected to be working on … but oh my goodness what an incredible experience.

I was part of an amazing team and we all worked really hard. As a result our volunteers were able to support more than 2,000 people living with cancer, in part because of the learning that we created.

Just imagine our delight this week when we heard we’d been shortlisted for the Learning & Performance Institute Learning Awards in the Digital Learning Transformation of the Year.

So exciting … now the long wait until February to find out the winner.

UPDATE – WE WON!!!