Education and awareness
Transparent career opportunities
Of course, education and awareness are critical to making progress with inclusion and ensuring our colleagues understand and embrace their key role in creating an inclusive culture in the workplace. In 2023, we started a programme of regular webinars, online conversations, and external speaker sessions focussing on inclusion, which have proved incredibly popular with our colleagues. Our most recent webinar in March 2024 celebrated International Women’s Day by highlighting the careers of four key women at Animal Friends, including three women in technology. By focusing on the fantastic opportunities available for women in tech and sharing inspiring stories, we hope to encourage more of our colleagues to consider whether this could be a career for them.
Our colleagues told us that having the opportunity to progress their careers at Animal Friends is really important to them, and naturally, it’s important for us, too. After all, retaining talent and nurturing progression not only allows our colleagues to flourish, but our business as a whole, too. That’s why, in 2023, to continue strengthening the internal career pathways we offer, we put bigger building blocks in place to provide exciting opportunities for our colleagues to learn, grow, and develop their careers at Animal Friends, including… • Driving a stronger focus on home-grown talent by encouraging our colleagues to apply for roles internally and supporting those who demonstrate potential but may have development gaps, which might include using Apprenticeships to support them, where appropriate. • Introducing focused career conversations, enabling us to better understand, consistently capture, encourage, and support our colleagues’ career aspirations.
This work will continue in 2024 as we introduce a Talent Assessment Framework, which will support our goal of ‘internal first’ recruitment, drive evidence-based decision-making, and help our colleagues shape their career and development priorities.
Powered by FlippingBook